Baking 101

Today is a beautiful autumn day in New England, a Norman Rockwell painting kind of day. It’s an auspicious day to make apple pies for Thanksgiving. And it’s a perfect day to make a bread pudding, that comfort-food-with-a-wow-factor dessert. Today’s flavor will be chocolate and cherry, with a nice bit of caramel sauce on the side. (Since I have no self control, I’ll make a smaller pan to eat between now and Thursday.)

My head is so full of plans for making these dishes that I have no room to think of anything to say about the food. So, I will leave you with two images. One, the oven.

This is Scooby’s EasyBake™ Oven. She got it as a gift from camp. Although I had expected my hard-core budding feminist to rail against having been given a girl toy (hard to re-define a kitchen appliance as an action figure accessory, but I was willing to try), she fell in love with it immediately. It helped that the oven is not pink.

The first project was a bit of a disaster, as Scooby didn’t realize that ingredients had to be carefully measured. (Doodle, always the gentleman, gamely ate the “cake” that resulted from that experiment and convinced her that it was dee-licious. He will make a fine husband someday.) The second project, S’mores, went much better, even though the oven can only bake one cookie at a time. We meticulously went through each of the fifteen steps, and Scooby’s finished product was closer to the masterpiece she was aiming for:

Maybe I’ll invite Scooby and Doodle to bake with me (using the big oven, of course). After all, even feminists have to eat. They might as well learn to bake while they’re young.