Tears, triumphs and Pillsbury Doughboy’s rescue

I always have preferred instantaneous, black-and-white feedback; confirmation that my efforts have enjoyed absolute success or utter failure; noteworthy victory or crushing defeat. In middle and high school, grades proved far too important, and long-distance running perfectly satisfied my demands for a concrete, objective and immediate evaluation of my abilities: My race, performance and months of training could be economically summarized with a mere two or three numbers. Times, reduced to figures like six-fourteen or sub-twenty-two, induced either sleepless nights and feelings of inadequacy or relieved waves of elation. Inevitably, cooking — what began as a purely recreational, whimsical hobby, a release from more demanding tasks — morphed into yet another yardstick to determine tangibly my contributions or wasteful fumbles to society.

The lure of the possibilities embedded within a basic kitchen and few simple ingredients enticed me at an early age, and I quickly expanded my repertoire of recipes from cakes concocted of packed wet sand and seashells to edible treats like homemade freezer pops of frozen orange juice or cookie sandwiches formed with Chips Ahoy! miniatures and vanilla ice cream. My poor parents patiently endured several questionable experimentations on my part (I remember one “recipe” involving some of my favorite foods as a 5-year-old: peanut butter cookies doused with Mondo grape drink, placed in the toaster oven for several minutes). Soon, however, I grew restless with what I considered to be amateur or childish menu suggestions and looked to my mother’s cookbooks for inspiration.

The concepts “slow” and “gradual” never quite registered with me, and I approached baking and cooking as I did all other things — with initial overenthusiastic fervor and naïve ambition. I took orders from my brother and father for their birthday desserts, and they obliviously delivered challenging requests, never considering that they perhaps ought to tone down their demands to suit a novice’s abilities. One year, when I was about 14, my father asked for a caramel cake, and I excitedly began scouring books for a recipe. I grew concerned when I realized that every version of the recipe required a candy thermometer, a utensil which we did not own, for homemade caramel frosting. But I believed that I had found instructions descriptive enough to cue the arrival of the caramel stage, when the cream, sugar, and butter perfectly meld together to form a rich, golden, thick sauce.

I made the cake with little trouble and even managed to keep all three layers perfectly intact when I removed them from the pan. Yet when I began to prepare the stovetop frosting, I panicked as the sauce quickly progressed through various shades of brown, from yellow-beige to taupe to honey. When should I remove the pan from the burner? I had no candy thermometer to indicate the proper temperature, so in a moment of desperation — I still fail to understand my logic here — I decided that I would somehow feel whether the concoction had reached the necessary 238 degrees. I stuck my index finger into the boiling sticky mess, promptly looked down at my finger and noticed the beginnings of a second-degree burn on its underside. Somewhere between my attempts to alleviate the searing pain with cold water and to remove the saucepan upon realizing that the mixture was almost black and hardening by the second, the tears came. I futilely spread the mixture on the cake layers with my unburned hand, but the hours of work I had poured into my father’s birthday gift were rendered useless. The caramel frosting would not spread and had actually progressed beyond the caramel stage to the butterscotch phase; I was trying to spread rock-hard butterscotch candy onto a delicate yellow cake. Failure. Undeniable failure. I threw the cake, all three stacked layers half-covered with butterscotch coating, in the trash. (My mother immediately rescued the cake, proclaimed that I could not waste all the money spent on the ingredients, and my dad slowly “ate” the cake, or discreetly stuffed hunks of the disaster down the garbage disposal.)

I have other horror stories, too, like the time I spent hours forming elaborate stained-glass window cookies for my friends’ Christmas presents. The homemade sugar cookie dough never would roll out smoothly, and after a bleary-eyed evening warring with — and being defeated by — the shortbread mixture, I resorted to buying a log of Pillsbury sugar cookie dough. And you know what? The cookies turned out beautifully, thus rendering the 12 hours I invested all worth it. (Not.) Unfortunately, one friend never did see the end result — intricate, colorful “glass” peeping through the golden brown cookie frame — because her Labrador retriever tore through the cookies I left on her porch, box and all, before she arrived home.

Of course, I forget all too soon my failures. It is the successes that keep me going, experimenting, rolling up my sleeves to face the next challenge. The deep sense of accomplishment that arises when I wiggle a crème brûlée and discover that I finally have achieved the proper custardy, almost-set interior and picture-perfect crunchy brown sugar outer coat; the murmurs of anticipation that accompany my removal of a homemade apple pie from the oven, with its flaky, golden crust and perfectly mounded, tender apples; the stares of admiration that continually return to my carefully decorated layer cakes, perfectly accentuated with well-placed details or cookie-crumb coats rimming the circumference  — that is why I persevere. After all, without the failures, the victories would never taste so sweet.

Emily’s column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at e.rowell@cavalierdaily.com.