I know this may come as a shock to some of you, but I’m a pretty good cook. Cooking, baking, cassaroling, I can do it all. I take pride in my yummy cinnabon cinnamon rolls. Just ask Justin. Every time I make them he mumbles, “These are the best yet!” And then he scarfs down 4 of them. That recipe isn’t for the weak. It takes prep time. So if you’ve got 2-3 hours on a weekend morning, just ask and I’ll give it to you for a small charge. <\/p>\n
However, there is a difference between cooking and baking. The microwave cooks it doesn’t bake. Jessi cooks and<\/em> bakes but that isn’t the difference. You bake things like cakes, rolls or cinnamon rolls. You cook things like steaks, beef stew and noodles. I’ve associated it with baking<\/em> yummy sweet things and cooking<\/em> hearty dinner type foods. I’ve never messed up cooking. But I have had 2 incidents while baking. My self-esteem was shot there for a while after those incidents, but I got the nerve to bake again–with counseling. As part of my therapy I will tell you what they were and how they affected me.<\/p>\n 1) I wanted a bagel. I didn’t have a job but I had a cookbook. Betty Crocker made it look so easy as she does with everything. So with plenty of time on my hands I decided to make some bagels. In hindsight, I should have just scrounged up the 95 cents and just bought one, but I was a doe head and confident enough to think I could do it. I made the dough and everything was working great. The excitement was growing. Until the instructions said broil for 2-5 minutes. Um, I’d never broiled before and I didn’t even know what it was. I assumed it was some baking term for ‘bake really close to the oven unit.’ So that’s what I did. Almost choking to death with blackened bagel smoke, I scrapped bagel making forever. Boy does Einstein and his brother have a tough job.<\/p>\n 2) I wanted to be Martha Stewart one Halloween. No not be<\/em> her, but I wanted to be crafty and creative like her. I found a recipe on her website for a pumpkin shaped cake. Oh it looked so good and I thought to myself ‘everyone at work will just love me if I waltz in with this.’ “Yes, yes I made it. Oh it was very simple!”<\/p>\n But it wasn’t and I should have written to her and complained that her recipes aren’t up to the standard of me, putting all the blame on her where it belonged. I also should have known that her recipes are for women who don’t work and have a kitchen the size of Wyoming. I had to buy all the ingredients because I didn’t own any of them. This wasn’t the standard chocolate chip cookies, this monster pumpkin was bigger than any chocolate chip cookie. <\/p>\n I started off great, following the directions. But I had two different pans so my final product didn’t line up. And the amount of chocolate that was supposed to be between the layers was well, too much. What a waste. And I should have just bought frosting, that’s a whole other disappointment. Basically the cake looked horrendous. But if you just cut it into slices, it tasted surprisingly good. Ok Martha, I give you that and that’s it!<\/p>\n So the second failure had a better ending, I could still eat it. And thinking back I remember Justin mumbling, “Hey, it still tastes great.” With his loving comments, food in his mouth or not, I have been able to get past my 2 failures with baking. Maybe I should give my cinnabon cinnamon roll recipe to Martha for payback for the cake fiasco. “Try to make those Missy!” Then we are even.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know this may come as a shock to some of you, but I’m a pretty good cook. Cooking, baking, cassaroling, I can do it all. I take pride in my yummy cinnabon cinnamon rolls. Just ask Justin. Every time I make them he mumbles, “These are the best yet!” And then he scarfs down read more