...adventure gone awry...

Dewey's Pizza School. That was supposed to be the big adventure for today. Learning to make one of the best pizzas in our area. I had been looking forward to it all week. But dear Mother Nature decided to, once again, dump a wintery mix in the St. Louis area, that has left the city silent and still. The class was rescheduled for a later date. So I decided to finally give that granola recipe I'd been eyeing on Pinterest a try. My eyes are still burning...

As a new baker, I'm learning to make sure I follow all the directions. Don't get me wrong, I follow directions...mostly. It's just that sometimes I think adding a bit more sugar, or vanilla, will make it have more taste. Sometimes, though, I can forget to add something that very necessary because I'm not following the directions.

But not today. I measured those ingredients and made sure everything was prepared to be used. I even learned how to perfectly pack brown sugar. The recipe that I chose said that crunchy granola bars come from toasting the oats beforehand, so I prepped them and set in the oven at the correct temperature. I even set a timer (I never set a timer) for ten minutes so that I could stir them. Twenty minutes in, when I opened the oven door to stir the oats a second time, I began to think something had gone terribly wrong.

No fire alarms went off, and I didn't see any smoke in the house, but when I opened the oven door some unseen force hit my eyes making them burn and water. I pulled out the oats 5 minutes before the twenty-five minute bake time and set them on stove. Through teary eyes surveyed the oats, which were much darker than the picture. The burning sensation in my eyes became so great that I had to step out of the kitchen for a moment. When I returned, I poured the honey/brown sugar mixture into the oats and pressed on in the hopes that it was just a little dark.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Nailed it!!

You can still smell the lingering scent of burnt oats, in the house, on my clothes, in my hair. The stench is so bad, in fact, that I felt it necessary to google “are burned oats toxic?” I couldn't find a straight answer, so, they very well might be. If we're dead tomorrow, tell the coroner it was the oats. I think it even woke Andy up, as he came downstairs to see what was going on. And it's so cold outside that you can't even open a window to air out the house.

What's sad is that I think they would be really great, if not for the burned aftertaste. Oh, the aftertaste! The memory of it makes me shudder.

Failing is no fun. Whether that failure is big or small, feelings of defeat, frustration and confusion bubble to the surface and can crush any hopeful spirit. And though we can't change the fact that we've failed, we can decide what we'll do with that failure. Will the crush be momentary, or will we hang onto it indefinitely? Will we learn something new and press forward or shrink back? Will we give up or will we try again? In this moment, we have the power. We decide the direction of our story.

So...this adventure in baking was a bust and, yeah, we're not going to be eating these. Anyone have any suggestions as to what I should do with them? Go to the park and feed the birds?