A butcher, a baker? I think not . . .

I cook, I don’t bake. Those of you who do too (cook and/or bake), know that there is a difference. So when I found myself in the self appointed position of having to create a Cardamom Coffee Cake, I had a sudden rush of panic. Now I say ‘self appointed’ because I actually volunteered to make the recipe knowing full well that I lacked the proper experience to take on such a task. And here I might just wander back a week or so earlier when I’d decided to bake some Whole Wheat Poppy Seed Cookies for another holiday get-together. I figured that all the other snacks would be unhealthy so why not bring something delicious and yet wholesome! I’d scanned through the ingredient list to make sure I had all the stuff it needed and I’d read the suggested prep and bake time. On the night of the gathering, I’d left myself just enough time to construct and bake said cookies. Now, if I’d taken the time to read through the entire recipe, I would have noticed that the final step required a rolling pin (something I thankfully had on hand, albeit the cheap, plastic model). And finally, the recipe called for a cookie cutter. Ooops.

So there I was with my dough all doughy and without a single cookie cutter in the house. I thought of my mother, an excellent cook AND baker, how she would use a glass cup to cut the dough for her wonderful, mouthwatering, made-from-scratch biscuits. So, I thought, if a cup worked on biscuits, why not cookies? By my dough was thin and the lip of my cup was fat, so rather than make clean little circles, my cookies were sort of pinched around the edges which might have been okay but for the fact that I hadn’t floured my surface enough so every time I tried to cut a cookie, it either stuck to the cutting surface or inside the glass cup. I did finally get the damned cookies baked and, although they weren’t beautiful, I took them to the holiday shindig where they stood on the table in sad comparison to all the gooey, chocolate, cream filled, decadent goodies that the other attendees had brought. I know that there were far more poppy seed cookies brought home than were eaten that night.

But this is not about the whole wheat cookies, it’s about the Cardamom Coffee Cake I offered to make. The cookie experience had prepared me, though, and so this time I read the entire recipe beforehand and knew for certain that I had everything I needed:

Bunt pan - check

Egg beaters - check

Large mixing bowl - check

Wooden spoon – check

Ingredients – check

Also unlike the cookies, I started the coffee cake process well in advance which proved to be a wise decision for I’ve come to learn that the writers of recipes who calculate the prep time all have a thing or two in common. They are all A) bold faced liars, and/or B) have the advantage of a sous-chef, and/or C) are writing their recipes with sadistic grins on their culinary faces. Suffice to say, my cardamom coffee cake took a “tad” longer than the suggested 45 minutes to prep. And here you’ll notice all the gadgets I managed to pull from my arsenal for the baking of said coffee cake. I kid you not; I used every single thing you see in this picture. Well, except for the plastic, greenish yellow mug at the top of the sink.

You might notice the hammer, a thing normally used for tenderizing meat, not necessarily for baking. But I’d forgotten to soften the four sticks of butter beforehand so I went where I always go when faced with a quandary like rock hard butter. You got it… Google! I managed to find several suggestions on hastening the process of butter thawing and I picked the one that offered a fusion of baking and exercise. It involved a zip lock bag, a sturdy rolling pin and a lot of butter pounding. But my rolling pin (remember my rolling pin), well, it would never have survived any heartfelt butter whacking so, like the glass cup cookie cutter, I found myself improvising again.

There I was, armed with my meat tenderizer, bashing butter as a hearty start to my coffee cake experience. I suppose it worked okay. The butter was no longer shaped into granite hard cubes. It was now smashed into four flat patties, perhaps not as hard as they’d been in their original state, but sadly, still frozen. So I let the pounded butter sit for a spell as I put together the rest of the ingredients. I sifted the dry stuff but then realized the recipe said to sift it all together. Out came a second medium size bowl to act as recipient for twice sifted dry stuff. I checked the butter, found it was still hard so I chopped the walnuts for the topping, checked the butter, whisked the egg, checked the butter. Although it was a full ten minutes from the ferocious pounding I’d given it, the damned stuff was still hard as a dead carp. I decided to proceed in spite of its stubborn resolve.

Now as many of you may know, when two people who’ve been on their own for a while, get married they tend to end up with two of most everything. Many of them might take an inventory and decide, well hey, we don’t need two sets of egg beaters, do we? But of course, Ron and I are not most people and we have kept our mismatched pairs of everything these last eighteen years. Sometimes our tendency toward packrat-edness proves to be a good lifestyle choice and this was one of those times. For no sooner did I employ my trusty (yet ancient) egg beater to the task of beating the partially frozen butter than my egg beaters began to object loudly. The sound they made reminded me of that time years back when the throw-out bearings in my old Chevy Super Sport were wearing thin. Every time I used first gear, the thing would scream like a dying banshee. One day I was pulling into a tight spot in a strip mall and I had to jockey the car back and forth, in and out a few times to work it into the parking spot, shifting from first to reverse and back again. I watched as people ran from the nearby stores, staring up into the sky. Now I could have been embarrassed, dug my foot into the pavement and apologized for making such a horrible racket. But I didn’t. I simply finished parking, exited my vehicle and then ambled away, gazing curiously skyward as I left.

But this isn’t about my old Chevy. It’s about baking a cardamom coffee cake with half frozen butter and ancient egg beaters. And this time, rather than looking up in the sky, I was looking down into a bowl, watching as globs of butter pinged off the sides of my glass bowl, flat refusing to be intimidated by the grinding, complaining metal blades, spinning toward them in slow agony.

Well, I thought, maybe if I add the eggs now, they would have some sort of chemical influence on the butter and perhaps coerce it to soften up a bit. Worth a try, right? Wrong! All this did was lend a new consistency to the globs so that now, rather than pinging around inside the bowl, they clung together into one massive, sticky glob that adhered to the inside cage area of the beaters and then climbed up the shafts, threatening to engulf the grinding motor. I had no choice but to retire my trusty old beaters, use a knife to pry the coagulated butter from the metal blades and then resort to using that second egg beater, the one acquired by marriage. Between the three of us, we finally got the butter beating job done.

While you won’t see that second set of beaters in the sink, I assure you, they’re there. Along with three bowls, every measuring spoon I own, two sets of measuring cups, my flour sifter, two wooden spoons and three rubber scrapers. Not to mention the bunt pan that was happily baking away in the oven as I tidied up the kitchen, a full two hours into my cake making project.

The sad part was that, like my poppy seed cookies, the cardamom coffee cake had some stiff competition and most people opted for the handmade biscotti or the raspberry filled butter cookies. Even the mince meat pie disappeared faster than my large, odd shaped monolith. Thankfully though, my husband works in an office where leftover anything can be abandoned anonymously in the break room where it’s guaranteed to be pounced upon within moments of first being sighted. Ron told me that my two hour cardamom cake lasted about a half an hour. I guess it’s nice to know someone appreciated my feeble (and perhaps final) attempt at baking.