Murphy pays a call to my kitchen

Hey Folks,

It was Bake Sale week again and WOW it was the most successful yet! I fear my coworkers will go through baked treats withdrawal when these sales come to an end on the 29th of this month. They are wonderfully generous, I feel so fortunate!

I will be truthful here though, and confess I wasn't in a very cheery frame of mind the evening before the sale. Murphy's law was in full effect in my tiny little kitchen and though my walls are painted white they may have had just a tint of blue on them from some of the language that slipped out a bit as I was dealing with the consequences of Murphy's influence.

It actually started the night before when I baked two pans of York Peppermint Patty brownies from scratch. I followed the recipe from the book, setting the oven at 425 degrees and baked them for approx. 35 min as instructed. After they were cooled, the instructions said to refrigerate overnight before cutting. The next evening before starting my second offering of Carrot Cake cupcakes with Maple/Cream Cheese frosting, I took them out of the fridge and let them warm to room temperature (which surprisingly for Oregon was in the 70's with all the windows open. Really, I hardly knew where I was :-P ). Took a knife to them and...Drat!...they were as hard as one of our cement beam blocks in the foundations of our homes. Yeesh! I started having cake pop flashbacks (see the Feb 27th post), not a good sign. :( I considered dynamite, but there are all kinds of safety laws regarding its' use (rightly so) and frankly I wanted to still have a place to live when I was done. So dynamite was out & so were those two pans of spendy brownie looking pieces of cement. Out into the trash. Ugh!

Went back to the cookbook to see where I had gone wrong (unfortunately, pretty much always a safe assumption in my kitchen & on the Habitat site). Compared it to a cream cheese brownie recipe I made the previous sale and...Drat!...a stupid typo. The peppermint recipe had the oven temperature 100 degrees too high. That's when the tinting of the walls began. It was back to the start again with only enough ingredients for 1 pan. Progressed along ok until I went to pour in the melted chocolate/butter combination and missed the mixing bowl and ended up pouring it on the counter. #@*%# Tint. While trying to clean up the mess on the counter, I bumped the bag of flour. Yep, you guessed it...more tint.

Finally got the brownies in the oven without further incident, baking at 325 degrees. On to the cupcakes. That seemed to go along pretty well until I went to toast the chopped pecans. There's a salad I make for parties that requires toasted slivered almonds. I can't begin to tell you how many times I would have to get in the car at some late hour at night to get another bag because I had once again forgotten about them and allowed them to burn. After enough of those trips (which sadly were more numerous than they should have been as I would tell myself that this time I wouldn't forget them), I would suck it up and just but two bags. It's become a habit now and of course I don't seem to burn them much any more. Needless to say, I have quite a collection now. Don't ask me why I didn't do it with the stupid pecans. So of course, I burned them big time and this time I refused to go to the store. There wouldn't be nuts in this cake batter, that was all there was to it. But wait! I had a stockpile of slivered almonds, enough to cover me if I burned 5 trays of them. I had to remember to take them out at the correct time sometime, right? Well golly, I finally did. Ok that problem solved.

Onward! With hope for a smooth completion until I dropped the spatula into the bowl with the mixer running. That's right...the walls were beginning to look like midnight blue. Cake batter went all over the place. On my clothes, the wall, counter, floor and even a few feet away on the oven. *Sigh* Ok then, time to make more cake batter. Thank goodness I had extra carrots but save me, I had to toast more chopped nuts. Will this never end? :(

Finally everything was done. My kitchen was a wreck & I had dirty bowls & pans coming out my eyeballs, But all the baked goods were safely in the refrigerator. The bad news...it was 2 o'clock in the morning & I had to be up for work in two hours. Needless to say there was some blue tint on the walls of my bedroom when the alarm went off & I wasn't Little Mary Sunshine that morning at work. Tried to just keep it in my cube.

As you might imagine, I couldn't help to but have my spirits lifted by the generous donation from my wonderful co-workers. As well, my super celebrity co-baker Austa, made mountains of delicious Butterscotch-Chocolate Chip cookies and Reese's Peanut butter brownies. Saved my bacon that girl! So grateful. That day we collected $87.15 for the Women Build project. All me previous escapades were worth this outcome. It was a good day!

Nanette