Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.
All season long, the big white tent calls out for bakers to join it. It sits out there in the field, waiting: its ovens preheated, its ingredients dolled out, its cameras set up. Only on the weekends do the bakers arrive and fill it. They try so hard. They dash back and forth. They get handshakes and they get sent home. After all these years, it’s easy to imagine that the tent both dreads the big day of the finale, with all the people and pomp and circumstance, and longs for it. The baking season is always longer and shorter than you expect it to be. Here we are now, at the finale. In our case the tents are metaphorical, and inside them chaos reigns.
The technical challenge presented for the final episode of this season of The Great British Bake-Off, the tent's final insult, was a monstrosity assigned by Prue Leith. She wanted the bakers (and us) to make a white chocolate and lemon madeleine tower. The contestants were asked to make 31 individual madeleine cookies, soft and buttery and lemony. Then these beautiful madeleines were to be disgraced by being dipped into vats of white chocolate that were dyed various shades of pink. Then, once you had your 31 madeleines all dyed pink, they were supposed to be injected with lemon curd using some special tip and attached to a tall cone and topped with a ribbon. Wow, a pink ombre tower of madeleines that are stuck to a cone!
This sounds like a very nice bake if you were making a background decoration for a baby shower on a CW show. But to us, it sounded like fucking hell on earth. All season the judges for this show have trotted out the weirdest, most needlessly complicated, most unappetizing bakes known to man. They have demanded we deal in mainly white chocolate and icing sugar so much that it seems as if the goal of the show is not to see who is a good baker, but to catch someone in a trap of failure.
Unfortunately for the creators of The Great British Bake-Off who do not know us or care that we exist, we have free will. Our tent is not sentient. There are no producers standing in the wings shooting B-roll of us rolling out dough. We are two individuals in their own kitchens, sick of making 1,000 dirty dishes for a bake that turns out to be mediocre even if executed correctly.
Enough! Welcome to the finale. We're in charge now.
Chris Thompson: Hello Kelsey, and welcome to the grand finale of our annual baking endeavor. We made it! Congratulations to us!
Kelsey McKinney: Congratulations to us both! We did it! The finale yet again, and here we are in the tent. How do you feel?
CT: To be honest, I feel pretty exhausted. The bakes this season have been more challenging, more openly designed to cause pain to the bakers, and in many cases the reward has not really been there. Interestingly, though, this has not dampened my enthusiasm for Doing Bakes. I just have not had a lot of fun doing the bakes of Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith.
KM: I have honestly felt very supported reading the comments on these blogs this season because everyone seems to agree that from a production standpoint at least, this was a bad season! The assignments themselves were often exhausting and not in an interesting way. This morning, when I was trying to remember this season, I could barely remember any of our bakes because I don't think I ate any of them.
CT: The ones that stick in my mind are the school cake and the framboisier, two bakes that I did not eat at all.
KM: How stupid! That said, I feel that yet again we have improved as bakers, as evidenced by our admittance to the finale yet again!
CT: I really do feel that we have gotten pretty good at baking. I was venting about this season to my poor wife recently because it occurred to me for the 70th time that getting good has been something of a curse: It is much harder for me to accept failure, or even the possibility of failure, now that I have somewhat higher standards for my own baking performance. I am no longer satisfied merely to have not burned my house down.
KM: Yeah, I completely agree with that. Bakes I would have been thrilled with during our first season are now my greatest disappointment and they pain me. But I think like all advanced novices we are at the worst part of the game, where we have improved enough to know what we are doing wrong, but not enough to execute things at the level of our taste.
CT: That's exactly it. And this is roughly the point where I tend to give up on things, which I have finally learned in my old age is a mistake. I am at the same point with other things that I've been trying to learn over the past couple of years, and I'm hitting the same wall of frustration. This pattern is how I have managed to become an advanced novice at lots of things in my life, and absolutely not anything better than an advanced novice at anything.
KM: Yes! I have a similar problem! I think the reality is that it is quite easy to become an advanced novice at most things, but rather hard to become advanced. You get used to constant improvement and then it just levels out for maybe forever? No thanks!
CT: Kelsey, I feel that it is time to discuss our approach to this finale. On the show, the contestants were challenged to produce something called a Madeleine Tower. You and I took a long look at this. And then something happened. Would you care to explain this to our readers?
KM: Well listen. The first thing that happened to me was that Chris's wonderful wife texted me that "This season was not meant for things that people want to eat. And this episode will piss you off." Unfortunately for me, I had received many of these texts this season, so I was prepared to enter the fray of misery with you.
CT: I heard her sighing and chuckling in the other room as she was preparing the materials for this bake, and I knew it would be bad.
KM: Then, you sent over the instructions she had beautifully written up for us, and we were supposed to have 31 madeleine moulds, a polystyrene cone, and a very special piping tip. The recipe also called for 400g of white chocolate, but that wasn't really the problem. The problem was that you and I are co-owners of this company and it is part of our job to think about how we spend the collective money. Madeleine tins are not exactly expensive, but also WHY!!!!
CT: Right, I mean, this is not necessarily what we want our readers thinking about, but it just is what it is. And then there is the issue of this having been a tough season, us having put up with a bunch of bullshit already, and neither of us having any interest in making 31 goddamn madeleine cookies.
KM: Especially to then paste them to a stupid cone.
CT: So when I sent the instructions over to you, I was prepared to argue against us doing this bake. It turned out I didn't have to do very much arguing! We were of one mind on this.
KM: I was very scared that you were going to be excited about this and then I would have to make 31 Madeleines and staple them to some kind of cone I made out of cardboard. But in fact, we both decided to spare our kitchens and our households from the mess of yet another bake that is not good to eat.
CT: But we wanted to do a bake! Because we like baking, and we like eating delicious baked goods, and because we have been denied so many opportunities to just bake something tasty this season.
KM: And because it's the damn finale! We deserved—we reasoned—the REWARD of making something that was good.
CT: I knew that I wanted to make either bread or a pie, because these are my two favorite things to bake. And since it is autumn, I settled on baking a delicious apple pie. I know this is not a very advanced baking challenge, but for crying out loud I just produced a damn framboisier. Cut me some slack!
KM: I really wanted to make an enriched dough, since we did not get to make very many doughs this season, and almost no bread! I also wanted the bake to be leisurely. I wanted it to take 16 hours but only require like one hour of work. So I decided to make sourdough cinnamon rolls, a treat I have tried (and failed) to make several times, but still desire deeply.
CT: I love cinnamon rolls so much. After you told me about your choice, I spent half a day fantasizing about cinnamon rolls, staring off into space, occasionally scrolling around the internet just looking at different recipes.
KM: I love apple pie so much. It's my favorite pie!!!! I think this challenge was also a good reminder to us about how nice it can be to bake something, which we needed.
Ingredients and Shopping
CT: Another nice thing about baking an apple pie: Except for the apples, I already have all this crap around the house. And no fancy expensive equipment is required whatsoever.
KM: Yeah, I want to admit that a big part of the reason I wanted to make the cinnamon rolls is that they don't require anything fucking weird. I already have cinnamon and butter and flour and sugar. I already have a sourdough starter that has been fed. I did not have to buy anything!
CT: I bought apples and I bought apple cider. I decided that I was going to make my apple pie a caramel apple pie, and I have this recipe for a cider-based caramel sauce that I've made a few times and like a lot.
KM: God my mouth is watering just reading this. I want to eat the cider-based caramel sauce!!
CT: It's really good! I can't remember where I got the recipe but this one is reasonably close. Mine does not have cinnamon in it, and mine is more authentically caramel than this, but I bet this one is also delicious. Another nice thing about this bake, for me, is I got to go into my mental catalog of Baking Maneuvers and group them together into a fun baking project. For example, a caramel sauce that I know how to make and like a lot, plus a pie crust method (the rub-in) that I probably never would've really grasped without these baking blogs forcing me to try it over and over again.
KM: I kind of did the opposite. We didn't get to do an enriched dough this season, but historically they have given me so many problems. I never get them to proof enough and they never turn out the way I want them to. I had honestly been hoping that bread week would let me practice, but then we made fucking donuts. So I wanted to do something that historically has been my enemy but VERY SLOWLY.
CT: I love that all real scratch cinnamon roll recipes take 19 years to complete. And it highlights that there are kinds of bakes that are so good and so rewarding, but because they cannot be fit into the format of the show they will almost never turn up in a technical bake. Sourdough and enriched dough are just very long and slow things to make, but they're incredibly worth it! Unlike the vile school cake!
KM: Yes! I have made a lot of pie in my life too, and one thing I have always loved is doing the rub-in method with the butter in the morning when the light is nice (morning to me is 10 am) at a leisurely pace! Whenever we have to do it so fast and frantically on the show, it feels like an offense against god to me!
Stage One: Whatever We Damn Please!
CT: So what is the first step of making cinnamon rolls?
KM: The very first step is to make sure your starter is really awake. I am a child of chaos so I don't really measure what goes into my sourdough starter. I know what texture I want it to be so I just dump some flour in there and stir it around and add water until it looks right to me (something like cake batter). So I did this at noon the day before I wanted to make my cinnamon rolls and then again at four and by 8 p.m. my starter was ready to party (very bubbly).
CT: I remember when we made panettone with Dayna that she talked about how you have to fire up your starter more than usual for enriched doughs, and I think about that pretty often. I love the idea of turning your little pet yeast into an all-devouring monster, so that it can achieve its highest purpose: to become cinnamon rolls.
KM: Yes! I also remembered that. And I think if I had decided to make the cinnamon rolls earlier, I would have fed it extra for two days, but I didn't so here we were! What were the first things you did for your apple pie?
CT: Normally the first thing would be to get started on the dough, but because I'd recruited my child to help me with this bake, I wanted to give her something she could see through from start to finish inside the limits of the attention span of a four-year-old. So the first thing we did was to make stabilized whipped cream, using cream, icing sugar, vanilla extract, and cream of tartar. We put all that into the stand mixer and she was in charge of turning it on and watching it.
KM: Wow! Hell yeah! This is also something very against the bake-off rules: doing stuff out of order! Did she enjoy making it? How did it turn out?
CT: She did! She was really excited to see how it started to whip and thicken, and found it hilarious when I took the mixer bowl and turned it upside down over her head. Then she got to spoon the whipped cream into a piping bag that we'd stretched over a deep vessel. That was all a resounding success.
KM: I am from the land of Dairy Queen, and I have to admit that that trick always hits for me! It's so fun!
CT: Honestly, more cooking projects should come with tricks like that. They should make a noodle that you test for doneness by throwing it like a lasso.
KM: Wow I AGREE! I love when there's a fun trick! My first step had no fun tricks and no exciting maneuvers. I just melted butter and put milk, eggs, my gloopy starter, and the melted butter into a bowl and whisked it together.
CT: So for non-bakers, your yeast has to be able to lift up and poof a dough that is weighed down with butter, milk, and eggs, and then also is slathered with a cinnamon mixture. That's what is meant by "enriched."
KM: The starter must be STRONG and COURAGEOUS and UNAFRAID!!!
CT: It's gotta have big huge muscles! Did you feel pretty good about your starter?
KM: I felt a little nervous because starters can sometimes trick me by looking strong but then actually being weak or vice versa. But this one had a nice rise at the second feeding and a ton of bubbles, so I believed in her.
CT: In the past, when you've had trouble with this recipe, has it usually been because the yeast isn't up to the job?
KM: Yes! And honestly, I have had problems with cinnamon rolls before with regular packets of yeast as well. I think the cinnamon rolls knew something about my soul at that time and refused to perform. But I have changed. I am older and wiser now and also I am more patient.
CT: It definitely seems more You to make sourdough cinnamon rolls than to use packaged yeast.
After my child helped me to make the whipped cream, and we stored it in the fridge, I started in on the pie crust. It's so nice to just know how to do this. Cold butter, flour, and salt, rubbed together, and then little hits of ice water until it starts to clump. I also added a little caster sugar, but probably not enough that it made any difference.
KM: Oooh! Since you had all the time in the world, how long did you let your dough rest for after you made it?
CT: It sat in my fridge, wrapped in cling wrap, for probably a little bit more than two hours. I did feel a little bit rushed, just because I was trying to get the pie completed before my child's bedtime, but not so rushed that I was willing to fly around and take shortcuts.
So the crust was in the fridge for somewhere between two and three hours, I would guess.
KM: I left my sourdough cinnamon roll dough next to my sourdough bread dough on top of my stove overnight for approximately twelve full hours.
CT: Dang! Did you otherwise do any proving tricks, at this stage? Pop a bucket over that little blob? Maybe some candles and a space heater?
KM: You know, I really wish I had. I keep my house kind of cold and overnight the temperature really plummeted. But my doughs had so much time that they had risen a sufficient amount by the time I woke up, so I decided to continue on my path toward cinnamon rolls!
Stage Two: Absolutely No One Can Stop Us!
CT: So what is stage two of making sourdough cinnamon rolls?
KM: Stage two is you must roll out your dough onto the counter and then put all the cinnamon sugar gloop into the dough, and roll it up, cut it, and then let it proof again!
CT: And what's in this cinnamon sugar gloop?
KM: The cinnamon gloop is: 6 tablespoons of butter (LFG), regular sugar, one tablespoon of flour, and cinnamon.
Because I like a savory roll, I added a little ground ginger and a little ground nutmeg here too! The gloop unfortunately did not look appetizing on account of looking like poop, but that’s okay.
CT: All poop should smell like this, in my opinion.
KM: After spreading the brown goop you just roll it up into a log and slice it.
I do want to tell you one cool trick I learned in this process!! Because I was going to proof my second round of cinnamon rolls in a springform pan, I needed to line the pan with parchment paper. I read one blog about making cinnamon rolls that I didn’t end up using the recipe from where she said to scrunch your parchment paper into a little ball and then unfurl it and then fit it into the springform pan. This worked INCREDIBLY well and I really recommend it.
CT: I love that. I am basically always Doing Infomercial Hands whenever I handle parchment paper.
KM: Same!! What was happening with your dough once it emerged from the fridge?
CT: Well, while my dough was in the fridge, I made my caramel sauce.
This is a cool process: Put sugar and apple cider into a saucepan and boil/simmer it way down, until it is almost a syrup. Then stir in butter and cream.
Then simmer this down until it is dark and thick, and then add a splash of vanilla and some salt. You almost cannot fuck this up, and I know because I have made it probably five times now and have never missed.
KM: Wow this sounds so good. I cannot explain how much I want to eat the caramel sauce right now. I'm intrigued by the fact that after a heavy caramel season, you returned to caramel for your special finale bake!
CT: It seems insane, but I am confident that I cannot fuck up this sauce, and so it doesn't feel at all risky or annoying. Once I'd finished with this, I poured it into a jar, minus the one spoonful that went directly into my mouth.
KM: Did you make more than you needed for the pie? Or only the right amount? I wish you had made a gallon and given some of it to ME.
CT: Yes. It is very nice, now, to have half a jar of stable caramel sauce in my fridge right now. I'm thinking about it.
KM: That does sound great! Then did you begin rolling your dough? Did you par-bake?
CT: I hauled the dough ball out of the fridge, cut it into two pieces, and rolled one out nice and flat.
I then fit this half down into my springform pan—I like a deep-dish pie—trimmed the top and sort of patched the edges, and then walked this down to the basement freezer.
I then rolled out the second ball nice and flat, and considered whether to attempt a lattice. I decided not to, because I am bad at it. But I wanted the pie to look nice, so I trimmed some decorative dough shapes to pretty it up.
KM: I also feel like a lattice would be very hard to accomplish in a springform pan. The lattice is easier in a pie pan because there is a lip there for the dough to sit on while you are doing your weaving of dough. What shapes did you choose?
CT: I made an apple, and then I made a smiley face, and then I made the letters of my daughter's name, which is Lily. I figured she would get a kick out of seeing her name on there when it came out of the oven. But I was careful not to tell her about this beforehand, because there was a very decent chance that the decorating project would fail.
KM: That was very smart! How did you attach the decorations to the dough? Or did you wait until assembly?
CT: I cut the second sheet of dough into a big circle, to fit over the top of the springform tin, which I intended to fill to the very top. And then I used water to glue the shapes onto the circle. And then I put the circle onto a sheet of parchment and put that into the freezer, alongside the rest of the crust.
KM: I love this plan.
CT: How long did you give your formed buns to proof, this second time?
KM: Well, I intended to give them one hour. But my kitchen was so cold that I ended up bringing them upstairs and setting them on top of a heating pad after the first hour for another additional hour! They did puff up after their time on the heating pad, but I was a little concerned. They were not touching! Cinnamon rolls are supposed to touch!
CT: Ah, that was smart of you. I guess you could at least hope that they would continue to poof up during the bake?
KM: Yes. This is exactly what I hoped for the whole hour I looked at them while I edited my blog. What did you do for your filling? Did you coat the apples?
CT: I did! I used a combination of Granny Smith apples and either Macintosh or Honeycrisp apples (I can't remember). Granny Smiths make a tart pie, and the others are sweeter.
KM: I loooove Granny Smith apples because I love when a pie isn't so so so sweet.
CT: I will once again admit in this space that I have trouble with apples. I am not a great lover of raw apples, though I try and try. And the apples that I enjoy eating the least, other than Red Delicious, are Granny Smiths. Their combination of flavor and texture hits my brain in a weird way where, like, my skin crawls when I bite into them.
KM: I appreciate this honesty. And I think you were very brave for making an apple pie despite it.
CT: It's weird because I love cooked apples, and I really want to love raw apples. I learned recently that at least one other notable husband—the husband of Kate Winslet—also has this precise hangup. The way she describes her husband's experience of biting into an apple—nails on a chalkboard—is exactly how I describe it. Unlike Kate Winslet's husband, though, I will bite into an apple, again and again and again, because I am absolutely determined to get over it. Even now.
KM: Wow, so you're basically a movie star? That's what I’m hearing. You just don't like the snappy texture. It makes sense to me! It's a specific texture!
CT: It's a character flaw, is what it is. I did coat my apples, in a mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, caster sugar, and lemon juice. I did not measure any of this stuff, I just kinda dumped spices on there, mixed everything around with my hands, decided it was not speckled enough, did some more poofing, and became satisfied.
KM: I love not measuring! It is my passion!
CT: At this point I had my crust in the basement freezer, my caramel in a jar in the fridge, my whipped cream in a piping bag, some vanilla ice cream in my other freezer, and my dressed apples in a large bowl. I was READY TO ROCK.
KM: Wow! You made so many ingredients and they were all ready to go. I, meanwhile, had my cinnamon rolls proving on top of a heating pad, and was very scared.
Stage Three: BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
CT: When did you know your cinnamon rolls were ready for baking?
KM: A problem I frequently have is remembering how big the bake was before it started proving. Because of this blog process, I am always taking photos of the bakes as I go, and this has turned out to be very helpful. So after two hours of proving (one in kitchen, one on heating pad), I was still convinced that the rolls hadn't changed at all. But I looked at the photo from earlier to be sure and in fact, they WERE puffier than before!
CT: Proving is sometimes scary, to me, because I always worry that I will wait too long and my dough will start to deflate, and once that's happened I think there's no way to reverse it?
KM: I really still struggle with understanding if something is under-proofed. Over-proofed I think I have a better grasp on identifying in a final bake. At that point, I had been sitting patiently by the cinnamon rolls for so long, that I simply could not wait anymore!
CT: At some point you've got to just bake those suckers.
KM: What happened when you went to assemble your pie?
CT: OK, so here is where I did run into an issue. I was layering my apples very carefully in a ring around the edge of the bottom of the crust, and I remembered that I'd intended to add a thickener to my apples, which I know is a somewhat controversial call but I am what I am and I like a gloopy apple pie. I like some gloop in there! Sue me!
KM: It’s your pie! Your rules!
CT: So I had to take the apples back out and get the crust back into the freezer while I considered my thickening options. I ultimately decided to use regular flour, just maybe like two tablespoons of regular flour sifted in there and then mixed it around with my hands. I then brought my crust back upstairs and started over on the assembly.
KM: That sounds like the right move to me!
CT: My process was to do a very careful layer of concentric circles of apple slices, and then to drizzle caramel all over it with a spoon, and then to do another layer, and repeat, until I'd filled the crust to a mounded top. This wound up requiring eight apples, in total.
KM: God. This sounds incredible. I'm so hungry. Eight apples is so many! I'm amazed that your crust was able to sustain this! Did you pile them up over the top edge of the springform pan?
CT: I did not, just a very slight mound. I knew that they would lose some bulk in baking and that this might cause the roof to sag somewhat, but I wasn't sure how to get the top on there at all if I was too aggressive with stuffing apples in there and balancing them to crazy heights. Getting the lid on there was already a challenge for my stupid blogger fingers.
Meanwhile, I'd preheated my oven to 375 degrees, but I bumped it up to 400, thinking about the heat necessary to really brown the top of my pie.
KM: I preheated my oven to 400 degrees and then bumped it DOWN to 350 degrees. I tried this method because, again, my kitchen was fucking freezing.
CT: Is there any brushing or treating of the cinnamon rolls before they go in the oven? I did a little egg wash to the roof of my pie.
KM: Wow. I did not even consider doing an egg wash. I wish I had!
CT: I guess that would be risky with an enriched dough, just because it would be another thing for the dough to lift in baking.
KM: Yes. True. But imagine how beautiful it would be if it had worked.
Stage Four: Dabbing on the Haters
CT: How long did you figure to bake your cinnamon rolls?
KM: I left them in for 35 minutes and checked them. I was very happy because they ROSE. They were all touching! But I wanted to give them a little more time for optimal browning.
How long was your pie in the oven?
CT: I set my timer initially for 12.5 minutes, which is a random number but I was in a weird headspace where 15 minutes felt like too many and 10 minutes felt like too few.
KM: What? Oh! Before you checked on the pie! I was like, Chris … pies do not cook in 12 minutes!
CT: This wasn't for the full bake! This was just to remind me to check on the pie! So after 12.5 minutes, I opened the oven and rotated the pie, even though there was no real color on there. My oven is just very unreliable and uneven and I didn't want my pie to ever go unobserved for very long.
KM: Did you use your special mode on your oven?
CT: I did! Convection Bake mode. This is a more reliable setting, and I'm glad I figured that out, but it's still not totally trustworthy. So after approximately 25 minutes, I bumped down the heat, from 400 to 350, because the pie top had started to gain some color, and for the next probably 45 minutes to an hour I just checked on it very regularly, always rotating it. I had cut a piece of foil to make a cover, but I never wound up needing it. Eventually it was evenly browned and goo was bubbling out of its vents and it just looked done as hell.
I think it was in the oven for a total of maybe an hour? Or even longer? Can that be right?
KM: Wow! I think that could be right! Pies take a long time, and yours had NINE apples in it! My house smelled incredible while my cinnamon rolls were in the oven. Did yours also smell good?
CT: Oh yes. The smell of cooking apples is absolutely amazing. I'm so glad that we both had amazing smells in our kitchens.
Do cinnamon rolls bake forever?
KM: No! My cinnamon rolls came out after 42 minutes and they looked perfect and I was so happy. I had intended to make them an icing, but I decided that I don’t like icing very much anyway, and this was my bake, so I didn’t!
CT: I'm proud of you for this choice. I like the icing on cinnamon rolls but I also think that a really beautifully made cinnamon roll absolutely does not require icing.
The Finished Product
KM: Show pie?
CT: Here is my pie:
KM: It's so beautiful. I cannot believe how nicely browned the crust looks and how little seepage there is! Eight apples and no goop running out the side of it! I think you should be very proud!
CT: I'm very happy with it. It's a bit rough and rustic but that's something I like in a pie. And I feel great about how evenly it's baked, which I consider to be the reward for constant monitoring and rotating.
KM: Yes! It looks beautifully even! I feel proud of it and I didn't even make it!
CT: Thank you! Show cinnamon rolls?
KM: Here are my cinnamon rolls:
CT: Those are some great looking cinnamon rolls, I'm so impressed.
KM: I'm really happy with them!! I ate one the minute it cooled down enough for me to get it out of the pan without burning myself, and it tasted great too. I'm on top of the world!
CT: Which one did you choose? Because that one on the right front looks AMAZING to me.
KM: I ate the tiny one first in case they were bad! But then I ate a big one, don't worry.
CT: I see that little baby one hiding back there. I'm so glad they turned out. Ever since you started this bake I have had a cinnamon roll recipe pulled up in a tab on my laptop.
KM: You should make them. It really was so worth it. What a fun bake this was! Do you feel renewed with the spirit of baking?
CT: I totally do. My pie tasted great—it's maybe a touch more tart than is my ideal but I gather this is how other people prefer an apple pie—and today I am so happy to have it in the house, calling out to me, whispering from the fridge.
I was so pleased by this bake that I then helped my wife and child make oatmeal raisin cookies the following night, and I'm already game-planning a cinnamon roll bake for next week. Baking is fun as hell when you can just, you know, bake.
KM: 'Tis the season to have your oven on!
CT: Love to bake!
KM: The next scheduled time we bake together for the blog, unless we go rogue, should be our exciting fundraiser with a reader!
CT: That person, whoever they are, is in for Total Hell. Prepare to suffer!
KM: Yeah, truly! I am excited to welcome someone to the Chaos Tent either to judge us for our mistakes and bother us like Noel, or to join us in our masochism! Happy baking!
