I don't bake. Really. I have, I've tried many times, I've failed many times. For example, I made cupcakes once with my friend Katie and when we put the frosting on them it melted right off... yes we should have let them cool... not the point, I failed. I made a cake for my dad's birthday. I thought I'd make it from scratch, by myself, it called for shortening, I didn't know what that was (in my defense I was maybe 10) so I didn't put any in... yeah it couldn't have been more dry. I made a cake for my mom's birthday... you'd think I'd learn my lesson by now... it was a layered cake with chocolate frosting. When I made it, it was about 90 degrees in our apartment, I had to transport it to my parents, by the time I got there...
Yeah... don't talk about it. (In my defense it tasted really good).
So, I don't bake, except for last week when I decided it was baking something or keeling over from the stench of bacon. Which is where the story starts, with bacon.
Last Saturday morning, Jeff and I decided that we needed a decent breakfast because we had a big day ahead of us. We were going to register at two stores for all the baby stuff we need. We thought it might be fun and tasty to make a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel. Well I thought it all sounded good minus the bacon, I've never really been a fan. So Jeff fried up some bacon on a skillet, charred it a little, filled the kitchen with the aroma of semi-burnt bacon, and slapped some on his bagel. I made the eggs and have to say for not being a big fan of eggs either (it's the texture) it was actually really good.
Now our house smelled a tad like bacon... well really bacon was overtaking the entire house and felt like it was seeping into my pores, so we opened some windows and left to do our registries. We got back home pretty late, hoping the smell would be gone, but, alas, it was not. We tried to ignore it, lit a candle, opened more windows, changed our clothes, turned on a fan. It was all in vain, we still had a bacon-scented home. So our solution... cook something to cancel out the smell. Well it was late and so cooking was out which leaves baking. So we decided to bake some sugar cookies. I bit the bullet, swallowed my fears, and thought the end product was well worth my inevitable failure.
Everything was going well. All the ingredients were mixing together well and it wasn't too hot to melt anything. But this time melting something wasn't the problem... and there's always something that can go wrong with me and baking.
I kinda burned the bottoms, not awful, but still. Maybe I'm too hard on myself, it's not like I caught them on fire or anything.
We thought we'd try baking the next batch for less time...
Much better. We even got crazy and added M&Ms to some of them.
But not too crazy, only one M&M per cookie. I don't want to get all creative and start to like baking now or anything.
You may be thinking this was the end, we baked, we ate some cookies, move along. Oh no, you can't have warm cookies without ice cream.
Let's drool at, uh, I mean look at some more pictures of this marriage between warm cookies and ice cream, shall we?
Yes, I believe two similar pictures are needed to show this true beauty.
So there you have it. I baked, I failed a little, but I redeemed myself with adding ice cream to make it appear flawless. It tasted flawless... and that's really all that matters.
