Sometimes ... I bake

I come from a family of bakers.  Homemade cookies, cakes, pastries, candy, chocolates.; anything one with a sweet tooth would want. But I was born without a sweet tooth.  I was also born unable to bake. I am sure I have the ability to, if I practice, but the gift of baking that runs in my family, was not passed on to me.

In my family, it is sacrilegious to use a boxed cake or *gasp* refrigerated cookie dough.  I didn't even know such things existed until college.  All you needed if you wanted a sweet treat was flour, sugar, eggs and poof....cake.  

My mother has a box full of flour covered handwritten recipes passed won through generations.  She has gotten with the times and typed them all up so that they are easy to search, but the box still sits on the counter at home.  My sister is a baker/pastry chef by trade.  She's made birthday and wedding cakes professionally, like people PAY her for her goodies.  My grandmother, mom, aunts, cousins, both of my sisters, they all have this gift.  They can whip up a cake and frosting (homemade of course) and decorate brilliantly all in less than a few hours.  Both of my sisters could make icing roses before they reached puberty.  I always figured I "could" have but I wasn't interested, decades later, I realize this is not the case.

I am not completely inept in the kitchen.  I can cook, in fact I enjoy cooking. Especially a big family meal with multiple sides of yummy veggies and starches and a hunk of meat. But baking eludes me. Homemade candies, cakes and cookies don't grace our door; my poor husband often says he picked the wrong sister (lovingly of course).

Being ungifted has not stopped me from occasionally trying, and that is what this blog is for, to show the world (or a small contingent of followers) that failure is an option and sometimes it tastes yummy.