I like to cook and I love to bake. Baking is where I find my happy, relaxing place in the kitchen. When I was a little girl, I learned to bake chocolate chip cookies, using my mother's Betty Crocker cookbook. When the internet became a cultural thing, I was in college; I remember my first online recipe came within a viral e-mail that one of my high school friends had sent. It was the notorious fake cookie recipe from a mall bakery. After that, I thought that it would be tremendously useful to find recipes on the internet. I've had good luck with recipes from brand sites, sites of famous cooks and allrecipes.com. What is great about allrecipes is that people with rate the recipe and write in the comments what worked and what didn't work in the recipe. Often, when people share how they improved upon the recipe, I'll use their addition(s) to make a better treat/meal. This method has never really failed me, as far as I can remember.
Then, there's Pinterest, my favorite site. However, it's also the worst site when it comes to recipes. There are so many recipes that look amazing and people claim them to be amazing, but it's such a guessing game. I've found some good recipes and some horrid recipes. Today, for instance, I was in the mood to make some cinnamon rolls, because it was rainy today. I thought that it would be great to warm up the kitchen and make the house smell like baked goods. I went to online and found what was supposed to be an amazing recipe. The recipe (initially) claimed to take 20 minutes to prepare and 20 minutes to bake, with a total of 40 minutes. I thought that it would be wonderful to throw together some pastry just in time for the Mister to come home for his lunch break and enjoy some freshly baked cinnamon rolls. Once I got 3/4 of the way through the recipe, with dough half-way mixed, the directions said to let the dough rise for an HOUR! Then further down, the recipe requires the rolls to rise for an additional 30 minutes. It would have been great if this little note was included at the top of the page, where it claimed to be a 40 minute project. I was thoroughly annoyed, to say the least.
The rolls, two hours later, came out great and were very much appreciated when the gentleman came home for the day; it was a welcome treat after being out in the rain. However, the experience has left me a bit jaded.
Lately, I've decided to stop the game and just rely on my cookbooks. I have a wonderful cookbook collection and those recipes have never failed me. I even have a spiral bound version of the same Betty Crocker cookbook like my Mum has. I rely on that book, still, to bake excellent treats. I've gotten into the habit of grabbing a small stack of books from my cookbook library and finding good recipes to meal plan for the week. The most surprising thing is, I'm now discovering recipes from cookbooks that I overlooked for years. One year, I received the "Desperate Housewives Cookbook" for Christmas. It was a gift, because I was so addicted to the show. I never took the book too seriously. After a recent meal planning session, I discovered that the cookbook is actually pretty great! It has a nice variety of recipes and they are all very easy to throw together. So, for now on, I'm going to take a more old fashioned approach to cooking and baking, and hopefully I'll have more success and less frustration.
Until next time~ Toodahloo!
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