Sometimes, your friend has a bad day. So you bake a pan of brownies, sprinkle sea salt on top, and wrap them up with pink tape.

Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, it helps.

I know I was just extolling the virtues of having access to a kitchenaid, but last night I was reminded of the joys of baking with nothing more than a wooden spoon.

I was craving banana bread when I went grocery shopping last Sunday (I love banana bread), so once I finally had some free time after the birthday cakes of doom project, I had all the ingredients. I wanted to use my family's favorite recipe, which comes from a worn-out booklet of children's recipes that my mother ordered for fifty cents from Gold Medal Flour at least five years before she had any children, but I couldn't get her on the phone to read it to me, and I couldn't find it anywhere online. Instead, I went to that bastion of deliciousness, Smitten Kitchen.

Unlike a lot of the other recipes I found online, this one doesn't call for the butter and sugar to be creamed together. Neither does my family's recipe. Instead, I always use the biggest mixing bowl and my favorite wooden spoon to stir all the ingredients together by hand. Using a wooden spoon always makes me feel earth-mothery and old-fashioned, like I'm cooking the way Laura Ingalls Wilder and family always cooked.

And cleaning a wooden spoon is way easier than cleaning all the crevices in a kitchenaid.

Happy Friday, friends!

I hope your weekends are full of homemade baked goods and not too much cleanup.

Cookies!

So, one of my goals in life is to have a witty blog, full of interesting tidbits and helpful observations about life. This is a difficult task, one not for the faint of heart. I also believe in updating as much as possible, to give my loyal readership of one (Hi, Lisa) (oh, wait, I think my Dad might read my blog now, which would make it two) something to read every day. So after yesterday's uninspired, pictureless post, I decided that I needed to do something I could write about. Being in a sorority, which makes you all girly and stuff, my friend Mary and I decided to bake cookies. Instead of going to tails at Sig Nu (which I actually ended up doing anyway and it was awk because I'm not good at talking to people), we found a recipe on the internet, trudged down two flights of stairs to the basement of the sorority, and got our homemaker on:
First, we stirred the dough. Yes, those are pong tables in the background. What is pong, you ask? Only the greatest drinking game ever. It requires skill. Which I do not have. But anyway, after we stirred the dough, Mary needed to taste it:
It tasted delicious. I think. I actually didn't taste the dough. But it looked good. Then we baked the cookies for 11 minutes, because that is how long we decided they needed to bake. (We forgot to write down the baking directions from the internet):
Note that I love this blog and my loyal readership of two so very much that, for the sake of having a removing-the-cookies from the oven action shot, I am posting a truly lovely picture of myself at my most attractive, having not showered for three days, or brushed my hair in that long either. Also notice the interesting stylistic choice of a hoodie that is five years old and has more holes than swiss cheese. But I digress. Once the cookies were done, we frosted them. Because we are in a sorority, we had to make the frosting pink:
Mary is so excited to be baking these cookies! It's because she knows that because she baked cookies with me, she will have her picture posted on the internet, and then she will become famous. Just like our delicious pink cookies.