Cooking with Rachel

As the minutes tick by, we draw closer to the InsideOut Christmas, and Matt has been working nonstop this morning on his message for tonight.  

Being the domestic queen that I am, I decided it would be profitable to whip up some sort of baked creation for him this morning.  I seem to go through various stages in the kitchen.  

There was a time where I measured everything, down to the pinch of salt.  That didn't last long.  Too many dirty dishes afterwards.  

In rebellion to my previous cooking habits, I then went in the kitchen with a boldness that thought I didn't need to measure anything.  This worked about fifty percent of the time.  The other fifty percent of the time it was just never ending unmet expectations.  

My most recent kick was cooking without refined sugar.  I'd substitute honey or molasses for the sugar, but it seemed that my final product just wasn't that satisfying.  "There's no refined sugar in these muffins, honey.  Can you believe it?" I'd ask Matt.  "Oh, yes, I can believe it" he'd reply. He'd stomach them down, but there were often leftovers, something that doesn't happen unless the food is REALLY bad.  

But, there's one thing that hasn't changed in all of my cooking phases.  Every time I cook, I always make some sort of haphazard mistake.  Fast forward to today.  I decided on coffee cake; easy enough, right?  Yes, it would have been if I'd read what size pan that I was supposed to use. Midway through pouring my mass of batter into a very large rectangular pan, I glance at the recipe only to see it calls for a much, much smaller square pan.  Great.  

So, I scoop everything out of the bigger pan only to find that I don't have a square pan.  In fact, I just have this oval corning ware dish (which now I'm thinking is much too small because it was only supposed to take 25 minutes to cook, and it's getting close to 40.) 

So...will my blueberry apple (it became blueberry apple because I ran out of blueberries) coffee cake be edible?  Only time will tell...

(Pause as I go check for the 4th time)

Well, I have a feeling the consistency will be anything but uniform, as the edges of the oval seem quite crisp and the middle is as soggy as a wet sponge at this point.  

:Sigh: Rachael Ray makes it look so easy!