2020 Baking Adventures

Hello burritos, and happy 2021! Watch me as I keep writing 2020 in my notes for the next five months. I know you’re sick of everyone being like, “2020 was so tough but we can make it through!” or the extremely overused, “tHrOuGh ThEsE uNpReCeDeNtEd TiMeS”. You know what else was trending? Baking.

And I hopped onto that bandwagon 100%.

There was this one two-day streak where I baked nine things without pause. Obviously, not everything was gonna turn out perfect which gives us some pretty entertaining stories. And yes, I’m absolutely going to recount every single one.

Sadly, I don’t have any pictures but I bet you can use your imagination.

THE DISINTEGRATING APPLE FRITTERS

I touched briefly on this story in the last post, but I feel like you need to know every juicy detail.

Let me take you back to a time where I wanted to make apple fritters. I want you to picture an apple fritter in your mouth right. It’s juicy, it’s cinnamon-y, it’s warm, it has that lovely bit of caramelization on top…you’re hungry now, right? (Good, because that is the goal of every post.)

Now, picture that apple fritter again. It’s disintegrated. And it tastes slightly like chia seeds. Which is gross.

Because of my brother’s food allergies, I had to make vegan fritters. To do that, we had to do this weird dough thing with chia seeds. It was turning out okay – it definitely didn’t seem like there was enough dough to cover the apple filling, but miracles can happen.

But not for these fritters.

Apple fritters being a type of donuts, they needed to be fried. I got a big pot full of simmering oil and popped the first apple fritter in.

Well, first of all, it didn’t cook. The recipe said to put it in for thirty seconds. I put mine in for five minutes and somehow, it was still raw.

On top of that, it had completely fallen to pieces. What a disaster. Now, I had these weird clumps of chia seed dough with a few bits of raw apple here and then.

The lesson learned? Chia seeds suck. (I’m sorry if you’re a chia seed, I don’t mean it to be personal.)

But guess what? There’s hope for this story. I combined all the dough and it turned into an apple fritter cake bread thingy that actually didn’t taste too bad. So, moral of the story: you don’t have succeed at something, you just have to be good at improvising.

THE CHOCOLATE SAUCE

I also mentioned this story, but why not get the whole scope?

We had a cookie exchange this one time and I, being ambitiou, decided to do these chocolate peppermint cookies with a chocolate dip coated in crushed candy cane. Incredible. Actually, I think I have the link to the recipe. Everything was going fine. I mean, the cookies were a bit flat and maybe shards of peppermint coated the counter and floor, but otherwise, everything flowed.

Then, time dawned to make the chocolate sauce. This was simple. It should be almost foolproof. But look, it’s me, okay? You make the chocolate sauce by melting chocolate chips in a saucepan. Simply. Well, it was all going fine until I decided the sauce was too chunky. So, I kept cooking it.

Well, guess what? It burnt.

The sauce was so extremely thick that there was no way I’d be able to dip a cookie in it without the cookie crumbling into bits when I tried to pull it out.

Well, I thought, stay rational. I got a can of coconut milk and dumped it in in an effort to make it more liquid-y. Did that work?

The chocolate sauce turned into cake. Literal cake. Not cake batter, no, fully 35-minutes-in-the-oven-at-350-degrees-cake. There is no way in goosetown that I could dip my cookies in cake. I stood there in shock as I looked at what I had created. How. How. It seemed to taunt me from the saucepan.

Now was an appropriate time to panic. Thankfully, my mom rescued the sauce and it turned out fine. The moral of this story? Have a person at standy always who can bail you out.

THE “DONUTS”

After the apple fritter incident, determination rose in me to bake one thing right. One thing I did that day had to go right, right? So, I decided to make more donuts. Because I’m smart like that.

I had had my eye on this apple cider donut recipe for a while. It even made it to my fall bucket list. I thought, why not? It was the type of donut that you bake, not fry. Initially, I felt a bit sad about that because I liked the experience of frying but considering my fritter fiasco, I thought that maybe it was for the best.

Everything was going fine. Except, we didn’t have a donut pan. Donuts that you bake will naturally be more liquidy than ones you fry since the frying donuts need to have that structural integrity to wistand the hot owl. It’s a bit like cake batter in that you pour it into a pan and let it bake like that.

I thought it’d be fine since I’d made baking donuts before by just piping the dough into circles. Well, I underestimated how liquidy this dough (or batter) was.

Though some began to look a little puddley, I thought it’d be fine. I popped it into the oven and found that, well, how do I put this? They kind of melted.

Instead of the beautiful round donuts I envisioned, I found puddles of batter.

Don’t panic, I thought, just bake them more and they’ll turn out fine. Alas, that was not the case.

I anticipated beautiful, light, fluffy donuts. I found flat discs. They were like cookies. But I figured, hey – that’s not actually that bad. Although initially mildly distressed (translate: I flopped onto the floor in a fetal position and screamed), I baked them a bit more and boom. Apple cider cookies discs.

Again: it’s the principle of not needing skill, just an imagination. You need to be able to adapt.

Whew, that concludes that! Why did I decide to post this? I figured you might need some cheer for the beginning of 2021. Also, maybe it’ll even inspire you to bake because no matter how bad it seems, you’ll always be able to save it.

Trust me, I would know.

Oh! I actually found a picture of the apple fritter cake bread thingy, so judge for yourself.

If you want to see another baking adventure, I tried to make an orange cake as one of my adventures in quarantine once. By now, I’m sure you’re aware of the chaotic beauty that would entail.

Oh, and if you’d like to see me do a post similar to the orange cake one, please let me know below:

(Please note that I will count all “honks” as “no”)

All righty! Have a lovely week and a lovely year, burritos!