Confessions of a Domestic Goddess Wannabe

Over the long weekend, I decided it was time to end the 3-month procrastination and bake those cookies. Even though I've never done any successful baking my whole life. Still, I was optimistic. A year ago, I'd bought a kids' baking book.

Then I chose a something I was confident of (cookies are less challenging than cakes):

Rubbing butter into flour. I remember doing that in school...now how can this go wrong? Apparently, I still don't know Murphy well enough. For one thing, the weather was so hot that the butter melted as soon as I started cutting it. For another, it's the 7th month and bonfires were raging merrily downstairs, so I had to close all the windows to prevent suffocation from smoke. That made us (me and the dough) sweat. At this stage though, I was still quite pleased with my progress:

But before I could even roll the dough up, it had become limp and cracked. Which meant I had to chill it first. Poor thing couldn't seem to recover from the heat and humidity, so I couldn't roll the dough into spirals. OK, I calmly improvised, I could make stacks instead of rolls. I'll just cut the dough into squares and pile them up - not too high, of course, else they wouldn't cook in the middle.

Pleased with myself, I proceeded to neatly cut the dough and stack them up . Of course, years of not doing maths meant that my well-intentioned squares turned into anything but. Note the contrast between the cookbook's version and mine:

Then I waited anxiously as the cookies wilted sadly in the oven:

I wondered why they weren't yet ready even after doubling the baking time. Ah...parallax error. Because I have difficulty bending down (well, try it with a football wedged between your tummy and your shirt!), what I thought was 160 degrees on the dial was actually only 145 degrees!

OK, no problem - raise temperature, tap cookies at intervals to check their progress, then take them out of the oven based on my poor judgment. Phew!

Cookies tasted fine, though they look a little worse for wear:

I think I'll need more practice before I can succeed in the baking department of domestic-goddessness.

Or maybe I'll wait another year before I intend to attempt anything - and then put it off for 3 months!