Redeeming my Baking Skills

Although I love cooking and consider myself a fairly advanced, albeit amateur chef, I am a notoriously lousy baker.  I mean TERRIBLE.  HORRIBLE.  The muffin dishes start to cry when they see me come near.  During snowmaggedon 2010, we made desserts for some of our wonderful neighbors who fed us continually during the snowstorm.  We're the youngest family in our area and I think our neighbors worry that we're teenagers who don't know how to feed ourselves - but I'm certainly never going to turn down homemade meals from our wonderful neighbors especially during a blizzard.

Anyway, so I attempted to make cupcakes...but I forgot to add the water.  As I spooned the batter into the cupcake papers, I couldn't figure out why it was SO thick, and then I realized my mistake.  We decided to bake them anyway and see what happened.  BIG inedible disaster.  Think hockey pucks.  (Brad just read this blog and said "WE did not decide to bake them anyway.  YOU decided to bake them, I had no part in this baking catastrophe."  Did I mention that the cupcakes were from a mix? Oy).  Rice krispie treats and no bake cookies are my specialty :)  Here's what we made for our neighbors during the storm (brad helped with some of the baking):

A few years ago I was trying to make cornbread muffins to bring to a family Thanksgiving celebration.  Somehow, I literally caught the oil on the tins on fire and we had to pull out the fire extinguisher!

During Thanksgiving this year I attempted to make a chocolate pecan pie and accidentally added the eggs to the chocolate mixture while the chocolate mixture was too hot...and ended up with chocolate scrambled eggs, or chocolate egg drop soup as Brad fondly referred to it.  Of course, being pregnant, my emotions were wild and I sat on the couch and cried before throwing the entire thing in the trash and starting over.

I'm not sure if it was moving into our neighborhood or having a child, but over the past 2 years we have found ourselves continually needing to bring a dessert to share to a meeting, event, party, gathering, etc.  Like at least 3-4x/month!  Given my notoriously terrible baking skills, we decided to take the "easy" way out and bought a huge 96 oz tub of frozen Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie from Costco (I LOVE Costco!).

We keep it in the freezer and scoop out some cookies to bake when we need them.  It's cheap, easy, quick, and appears to be homemade! Shhh, don't share my secret with my neighbors!

So, lately I've tried to redeem my baking challenges.  Brad thinks that my problem is that I don't really follow recipes, I often try to add ingredients, improvise, and I rarely measure - a huge no no in baking.  I normally use a recipe as a suggestion...a starting point really.  It gives me an idea of the direction I'm going in. This frequently makes for a disastrous result in baking.

I am working on increasing the amount of vegetables in our diets and have been on a carrot muffin kick.  I of course don't follow the recipe, I double the amount of raisins and add flaxseed.  20 muffins have a total of 4 cups of carrots in them (well, I don't really know how many cups of carrots were in them...I didn't measure, but that's what it looked like!).  Anyway, the muffins have turned out beautifully on 2 different occasions and are a delicious breakfast that our entire family enjoys. 

 Perhaps little by little I'm slowly redeeming my notorious baking reputation?  We'll see.  I think this weekend calls for banana bread!