The Horror, The Horror

I don't know how to bake things. I never have. When I watch shows about competitive baking, it simply blows my mind. How do people mix raw things together to make less raw, edible things? How do you even mix so much stuff without getting tired? Do you really need that much butter? My few ventures into baking have never been done alone, and even then, I feel terribly awkward about it. I feel like Einstein's fish, being asked to climb a tree.

Perhaps it runs in the family. Sometimes, when I'm feeling down about my lack of baking skills, I simply remind myself that the opportunity to do so was absent from my childhood. My mother did not bake. My grandmother did not bake. There seemed to be no reason for me to catch on to baking at an early age, either. 

I do remember one incident in which my mom tried to bake something.

It was a fine spring day, and for reasons completely unknown to me, my mom decided that we should try to bake some cookies. No one in our family had ever tried to bake cookies. We did not have a recipe. We did not even have a complete set of measuring cups. But I was young, and I trusted my mom's discretion, so we went ahead with our cookie baking plan.

At first, things went well. After all, between my mom and I, we at least had some experience with the simpler ingredients, like eggs, sugar, and flour. However, we soon encountered our first problem: butter.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not being racist at all when I say that Chinese people hardly use butter. It's simply absent from any traditional, common Chinese dishes. Such an unfortunate circumstance is rather inconvenient when trying to bake mostly anything. Sadly, we had already mixed together an entire bowl of ingredients when we realized our house was completely devoid of the ingredient.

Now, my mom has no problem with improvising with recipes. Sometimes, this leads to interesting, but surprisingly tasty creations. Other times, it leads to her using condensed vegetable oil instead of butter. 

Surprisingly, the vegetable oil mixed well with our "cookie dough," at least in terms of texture. I was beginning to think that we could fake our way through the whole recipe. But it wouldn't be long before we hit another road block: vanilla extract. Vanilla extract? What was that? Our knowledge of "vanilla" went as far as the ice cream flavor, which, as far as we knew, was white. My mom, with her lovely improvisation skills, decided to grab the nearest, white-ish colored solution in our fridge: a can of coconut milk.

We poured it in liberally, not exactly sure about what was enough. You see, we had never baked anything before, so we had no idea how to measure things. When we saw terms like "cup," or "teaspoon," we literally used cups and spoons. Surely, they would be close enough.

Several questionable ingredients later, our cookie dough (?) was ready to be baked. But of course, things at this point were not meant to go well. We didn't have an actual baking pan, but rather, a small mini platter, that just happened to be oven-safe. Undeterred, my mom and I lined the tiny tray with aluminum foil, scooped out what we thought was a proper amount of dough for each cookie, and then put them into the oven (after figuring out what pre-heating meant).

If you have read Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, you may recall Dr. Kurtz's famous anguished cry of, "The horror, the horror!". If you would imagine him doing the same exact thing, but rather, in front of our finished tray of cookies, you will have a proper idea of the monstrosities we had created. 

Our little tray had proved to be an utter failure as a baking pan, letting the finished product spill out of the sides. We also completely underestimated how much the dough would expand; the entire tray was covered in it. As a final smack in the face, the aluminum foil stuck to the bottom of the cookies, making us resort to prying our creation off piece by piece. I say "creation" because there really wasn't any other way to describe it. Rather than being cookies at all, they were like dark brown, brittle disks, barely thicker than paper, and so fragile looking that you couldn't help but feel a little bad for whoever made them. Which, in this case, happened to be us. 

I felt an immense sense of shame yet amusement. My mom called them "cute," which was surprisingly appropriate for their pathetic condition. And then, since my brother and some of his friends were over, we fed the crisps to them for a taste test. 

From what I remember, the cookies themselves actually didn't taste that bad. In fact, the only real complaint was the strange coconut after-taste. 

THE END