I love cooking and making good food.  I think I’m decently good at it too, most of the time.  I do have my limitations though, and I’m pretty quick to point them out.  I’m pretty bad at baking and making things that require patience and math.

Like when I tried to make rhubarb pie.  I tried to go easy on myself and used a store-bought crust. Easy, no problem.  I’m really good at unwrapping packages.  The filling is where I headed into trouble.  I can make  a decent apple pie because basically you toss some apple slices with flour, sugar, and cinnamon, throw the top crust on and bake.  Pretty hard to mess up. Well, apparently you have to be more careful with rhubarb pie.

First mistake- subbing the 2 cups of strawberries in the recipe I didn’t follow with 1 cup of raspberries and 1 cup of sliced peaches.  I mean, I measured!  I just took a liberty I shouldn’t have.  I also eyeball measured the 3 tablespoons of cornstarch needed.  This was probably the biggest mistake.  Raspberries and peaches are apparently juicier than strawberries.  I also made a crumb topping instead of adding a top crust.  Third mistake.

Well, as you can see, aside from the river of juice flowing through the pie, it looks great!  It actually tastes pretty good too, minus the soggy bottom crust that couldn’t possibly firm up with all those juices soaking through it.

It doesn’t help that I have the apartment stove from hell- after burning everything I tried to bake, I bought an oven thermometer.  The thing ranges from 50 degrees below the set temperature to 100+ degrees above without any rhyme or reason.  Moody oven.  I doubt my landlord will spring for a new one anytime soon, so I pretty much just keep opening the door to cool it down or turning the nob up when it gets too cool.  Classy.

Moral of the story: with so much against me, I really, really shouldn’t bake.  I’m bad at math, take too many liberties, and have an evil oven.  This won’t stop me from trying though, I actually have plans to make some of the kale bagels from Have Cake, Will Travel tonight.  Since it’s finally hot outside, I’ll make a batch in the toaster oven and try really hard to use measuring devices.

I did managed to make some really tasty cookies last week.  I totally made up the recipe after seeing a tasty sounding recipe in Veganomicon, and baked them in the toaster oven and they were a hit at my firm.  Oatmeal, raisins, dried cranberries, coconut, and almonds.  They were healthy and chewy and delicious and I barely measured and absolutely didn’t follow directions!  Take that!

Edit: Just made the bagels- they were great!  No final product pic, but here’s the awesome dough.  Make these!