I love to bake.
It’s one of the first hobbies I learned to do and partake in, aside from reading and exploring the Great Outdoors (and by Great Outdoors, I mean the woods of my backyard.)
It wasn’t something that my Mom or my Dad exclusively taught me, either. In fact, a lot of my baking nods go to the combined effort my Mom and my Nana put in while I grew up. Some of my oldest memories come from standing on a tiny stool my Grampa had tucked away in the coat closet, with my nose dangerously close to the giant mint-green ceramic bowl Nana was using, sniffing whatever magical concoction she was whipping up.
I especially love to bake when I’m not feeling well. Not anything like the flu or the common cold, mind you, but more along the lines when my body has aches and pains that just won’t go away. For instance, I have recently gone on a new form of birth control where, apparently, it is not unusual for a woman to go into a menstrual cycle for two weeks straight. This includes cramps, mid to severe mood swings, and the urge to cry and scream bloody murder at the next person who happens to walk by and scratch their nose. For the record, I did apologize to the poor unfortunate soul at the end of that sudden rampage.
On one of my worse days, I decided to stay home and veg out while my body adjusts to the medicine. During the day, I slept, cuddled with my furlings, and cleaned some to keep my entertainment levels up – weird, I know. And on a stroke of energetic feel-good happiness, I padded into the freshly washed kitchen and started pulling ingredients from the cupboards.
Now, here I should mention that I had tried baking brownies a few weeks ago with an old recipe I had found buried in my mom’s cooking drawer. The description sounded so good on the crumpled yellow paper that I had to try it. Here’s the kicker: instead of using the melted butter the recipe called for, I decided to substitute mashed pumpkin from a can.
The idea was I wanted to have some pumpkin-chocolate muffins (one of the few pumpkin-flavored treats I actually like – you can’t even taste the pumpkin in it!) but have it in a brownie form. Normally, we make the pumpkin-chocolate muffins with premixed brownie fixings from a box and one can of mashed pumpkin. But that night I was feeling somewhat ambitious. So, I substituted the butter for the pumpkin and went to town with mixing and blending the ingredients.
The house smelled amazing. It was as if I had locked myself inside a professional-grade bakery and all the ovens were spitting out trays of ready-made pumpkin-chocolate brownies every ten minutes.
But the fantasy ended when I came back to reality and pulled out my own tray of pumpkin-chocolate brownies. The treats themselves were almost as flat as pancakes, and looked like they were better off as bricks for a fire house. Instead of tasting like chocolaty goodness with hidden healthy pumpkin, they were the equivalent of licking cocoa-dusted oak tree bark.
That tray of gross excuse of brownies sat on the counter, with only three square-sized holes cut in them for a week before I decided to throw them out. It would be obvious for me to say I wasn’t feeling all that great about myself that week.
But, in true LaBree fashion, instead of accepting that I wasn’t that great of a cook and finding something else to do, I thought about that recipe. I turned it over and over in my head like a pebble being tumbled in a river’s current. I dissected the recipe as if I were some mad scientist hell-bent on becoming the next Dr. Frankenstein and creating the perfect human specimen.
Which brings us back to when my body was actively attempting to reject my birth control and leaving me as a ball of pain and misery in the process. With little else to keep my interest on my abdomen feeling like it was a hot sticky waterfall caught on a never-ending fire, I threw the ingredients of a new recipe together and hoped for the best.
This time, I’m pretty sure these brownies won’t last long… in a good way, of course.
L.J. LaBree 