I
roll out pastry with wine bottles and drop flour. I forget sugar and honest to
god thought one time very recently (as in last week) I could replace baking
paper with packing paper because it looked
like baking paper and all I was thinking at the time was ‘god I forgot the
baking paper’ and then relief: I thought how clever I am all. the. way. until I opened the
oven and only really realised then that it was an oven and ovens are hot and
hot burns paper. After I managed to separate the bottom of the galette from the
packing paper that had come one with the galette, I thought this to be funny in
a “it could always be worse” kind-ah way because under the pile of flour I
dropped was the smoke alarm, battery disgorged.
I
don’t bother pre-heating the oven because by the time I’m done with stage 1, 2,
3, the oven could have been pre-heated 4, 5 times over. And thank god I
happened to have a pastry cutter because I of course
don’t have a mixer, something I realised in July when I was baking cookies for
our new neighbour. It is now November but back in July I thought ok, I’ll just
mix the dough with my hands and now back to November I still mean to sound
disarming when I say things like “I can’t even bake chocolate chip cookies”.
This is to make me sound charming because who can’t even bake chocolate chips?
I haven’t yet met the neighbour.
Charmingly
enough, the lady who made the first chocolate chips also didn’t get what she
expected. She thought if she baked in chunks of chocolate that they would melt
to make chocolate cookies. Chocolate chip cookies are therefore a mistake and
my own chocolate chip mistake turned into crumbles crumbled on top of Greek
yoghurt with blueberries also. No one thought that was a mistake and when I
told about my mistake my sister said I should have kept my mouth shut because
then you create the space for people to see genius.
