- I am not, in fact, a Person Who Bakes. I am, at best, a Person Who Is Attempting To Figure This Whole Baking Thing Out, With Varying Degrees Of Success.
- Things they tell you to do in recipes sound so much easier than they actually are.
- Drizzling melted chocolate on top of something, for example, would be easier if melting the chocolate had actually made it vaguely liquidy, instead of a thick gloppy pudding-like substance.
- Possibly I used the wrong kind of chocolate.
- Adding soymilk will not help. It will, in fact, make it thicker. Ditto for stirring it lots and lots. Eventually it will come to resemble something you expect to see sliding along the floors of a dungeon sucking up small objects.
- Putting it into a Ziplock bag and cutting off a corner to simulate a pastry bag might have worked better if the chocolate had been cooler. Who knew the seams on the bag were that weak?
- Hopefully my oven mitts are washable...
- Eventually attempting to "drizzle" it onto your shortbread anyway will result in giant swaths of chocolate that look kind of like some animal had major bowel control problems in the general vicinity of your cookies.
- Trying to spread it around with a spoon will make it look like a preschooler's art project, but at least less like poo.
- It will taste good anyway.
- Even if you whisk your Dulce Sin Leche nonstop for the entire time from first combining the ingredients to taking it off the heat to cool, it will end up with strange white lumps in it of unidentifiable origin (soymilk powder?). But you can get most of them out by eventually forcing it through a strainer. Most of them.
- You can, indeed, soften brown sugar by putting it in the microwave with a damp paper towel over it. However, it is advisable to keep an eye on the time and/or whether the paper towel is still damp. Unless, of course, your intention was to set it on fire...
- This will result in parts of the sugar turning into chunks of caramel, which while useless for your cupcakes, are tasty to munch on while you clean up the mess.
- You cannot sift rock-hard lumps of caramel out of brown sugar. You can, however, render your brand-new sifter unusable.
- Do not keep your cooling Dulce Sin Leche near the bowl you are sifting flour into, unless, of course, you want it covered with flour.
- It is probably a good idea to remember whether or not you've already added the vanilla. Adding more "just in case" may or may not have been a good idea.
- Your cat will always attempt to jump up on the kitchen counter right at the worst possible time.
- When the cookbook says "Spoon a little Dulce Sin Leche onto the top of each cupcake and use a butter knife to swirl the sauce," hopefully they mean "Scrape a thick glob of the Dulce Sin Leche off the spoon onto each cupcake, and try futilely to turn it into a swirl until you realize you're just sliding the glob around without actually changing its shape any." Because that was how it went for me, anyway.
- True fact: baking just two things can dirty virtually every bowl, pan, measuring cup, etc. that you own.
- If I ever again declare an intent to bake multiple things for a Christmas gathering, or any other event, someone direct my attention to this post, OK?
On the bright side, they rose OK, they smell good, and I remembered to use those little paper liners this time. Little by little, I improve.