lazy baking

Baking is the best way to spend a lazy sunday afternoon. After church this sunday I spent the day baking at my friends house. Sometimes it's aggravating to bake in someone else's kitchen.  "Where are the spices?" I find myself asking.  "Where are the measuring spoons? And why don't you have a microwave?" We discovered that leaving frozen butter out in the hot June sunshine proves more profitable than microwaving it.

Microwaves aren't always good to me.  I've learned to keep my eye on that rotating stick of butter.  One minute it's a dry pasty stick, the next minute a pool of golden liquid. To keep it from melting completely I normally watch the top center.  When it starts to sink like a whorl pool, I take it out.  All the same we managed without a microwave, and softened enough butter to cover three loaves of Country French bread from work.  But of course we didn't soften the butter for toast.  We used it to make some two dozen cookies and a delicate white cake.  It sounds easy enough when I put it that way, but for a long silent while, we sat at the kitchen table searching through recipes.

I was surprised at the number of cookbooks they had.  Some were even from the 1940s!  But O how I love looking through cookbooks. The smell of cake flour resinating from the pages gets me in the mood for baking.  I stroke the thin, white, printed pages between my fingers.  I think about where this cookbook has been.  What dusty shelves has it inhabited? What little child's fingers have pawed through it, looking for delightful pictures? And most of all which of its recipes have inspired some of the most extravagant cooks and bakers?

We lingered a little longer around the table before we finalized our decision.  Two cake pans came out of the corner cabinet, while a mixing bowl came down from the one above it.  We beat butter and sugar, separated eggs, and fished out the accidental yokes. I toyed with the egg shells, tossing the yolks back and forth between shells.  The stubborn egg whites separated from their yokes reluctantly.  With a handheld mixer I whipped the whites.  The rapid spinners threw my arm back and forth.  I took a tighter grip.  A few moments later I checked for a stiff peak.  The frothy whites where Colorado's snowy slopes.  Maybe more like Alaskan slopes or an arctic waste land.  They folded perfectly into the ready cake batter.  The batter was unusually thick.  While folding the whites, the batter climbed up the mixer with intensions to destroy the machine.  We giggled and laughed at the seemingly alive batter.  The mixer fought back seeking to keep the cake batter in it's place. A little while later found the cake baked and cooling on a rack. To top it off, we iced it in black and white.  White frosting piped in chocolate icing.