Basically a Sally’s Baking Addiction fangirl post.
For the last several weeks, I have not often come to this space to write. When I have, I’ll be honest that I have gotten quickly frustrated and insecure. I didn’t want to write something sad – I much prefer to be funny (at least, I think I’m funny) and I just wasn’t feeling up to it. Instead, I have been feeling deeply the difference between anticipation (I really did Christmas this year, y’all) and apprehension – the looming “deadline” of my maternity leave has made me a bit manic. As I’ve said, I do love my job and honestly, I’m not upset to go back. It’s just (another) huge change, and change is scary. So, every time I sat down to write, I felt like I was just pouring out high anxiety mixed with a bit of depression and it just didn’t feel right. So, instead of writing, I baked.
It started with Thanksgiving and my apple pie. I needed a pie crust recipe that wouldn’t make me cry, and I found Sally’s Baking Addiction. I’m probably way late to the party, since Sally’s blog has been around for about 10 years at this point, but I don’t even care because she’s in my life now and I. Can’t. Be. Stopped. The pie crust was great, and gave me the confidence to keep going. Next, I decided I needed to make some gingerbread cookies. I happily bought myself some molasses and got to work. Again, Sally’s recipes did me right – I was enchanted with my little iced gingerbread figures.
I think that this is where I went off the rails a little. I bought the Nordic Ware baking sheets I’d had my eye on, as well as two new cooling racks and silicone liners to go with them. I was ready to go nuts, and go nuts I did. I made more gingerbread cookies and I made sugar cookies, and handed out as many of them to friends and family as I could. I started re-watching The Great British Bake Off and I decided that I must make focaccia (listen to Paul Hollywood say focaccia a few times and tell me that you don’t also get the urge). Did Sally have a recipe for focaccia? Of course she does, and it was delicious.
Around this point, I think that Rick realized the power of suggestion – he casually asked whether I thought I could make some biscotti. Almond, dipped in chocolate, he specified. By now, I was just googling recipes plus “Sally’s Baking” and if a result came up, I figured that meant it was a go. Luckily for Rick, chocolate-dipped almond biscotti is in her repertoire, so it entered mine. I made them on Christmas Eve, and I couldn’t get over the fact that they looked like real biscotti. I will definitely make these again. That week, I also made another massive batch of cookies for the neighbors (and for us). Yes, I became that person. I think it was about this point when I began to realize that I may be ready to go back to work and focus this energy on something with less sugar. I wasn’t done yet, though.
On Christmas morning, I made cranberry orange bread (also delicious) and that night I made spinach soufflé and peppermint torte (not Sally recipes, but still delicious). I would say that at this point I was in a baking frenzy – whipping around the kitchen somewhere between gleefully and frantically. I was very pleased with my success.
Another episode of Bake Off resulted in Rick requesting pretzels. The next day, I made pretzels and spicy cheese sauce, which are up there with my favorite of things I’ve made (ever). They were relatively quick and simple (the baking soda bath is kind of a smelly pain of a process, but worth it) and they are soooo goooood.
To cap it all off, I knew I wanted to make chocolate cupcakes with Fancy Sprinkles for New Year’s. These were surprisingly easy to whip up and, blessedly, the recipe only makes about a dozen cupcakes (and I gave away eight), so we didn’t end up eating our weight in chocolate buttercream. As an aside, the sprinkles were everything I could have hoped, and I bought way too many so I’ll be putting sprinkles on everything I can moving forward.
All of this is to say that I clearly needed an outlet for my pent-up productivity. There are only so many times I can restock the toilet paper in the house and organize the spice cabinet before I just need something more. My newfound love (or should I say addiction – ha ha) for Sally’s recipes and easy-to-follow instructions is serving my stomach well and nursing moms need extra calories, right?
Hickmans at Home 