Oven, smoven

I am either absolutely hopeless at baking or it’s my oven. I like to blame my oven.

In the spirit of fall (although it is summer weather out), I made pumpkin bars last week. I tried to follow the recipe to the letter. I have to admit that I’m notoriously bad at following instructions (stems from my repressed rebellion growing up in a Chinese family in small town Canada). But I did. The problem is when I asked the boy to pick me up cinnamon, the bought me cinnamon sticks.

Of course.

Trust a boy to buy sticks instead of ground cinnamon.

After a bit of elbow grease, I got some form of crushed cinnamon and the resultant “bar” turned out to taste more like moist, fallen banana bread with bits of cinnamon bark you had to spit out lest it becomes stuck in your teeth. However, shockingly, the boy loved it and ate more than half of the pan within 48 hours. (I suspect that its guilt for having bought cinnamon sticks) It was the first time he had ever liked anything I baked.

So, a friend came over yesterday and I thought I’d try the famous, highly rated chocolate chip pudding cookies. I halved the recipe and used oreo flavored pudding (hey, they said you could substitute!) but otherwise followed the recipe exactly.

What came out looked great and seemed nice and chewy but were in fact way too cakey. It wasn’t chewy, more airy and ‘puffy’ than the dense, chewy rich flavor I was looking for.


Stupid oven.