and now it's time for a short segment on the baking escapades in my kitchen. ...well technically not MY kitchen, but the kitchen in the house that i happen to live in. but you get the drift. or you probably wouldn't if you had an IQ of below 50. on the other hand you wouldn't be using the internet and reading blogs if that were the case.

ah well.

i tried baking cinnamon stars, following a recipe in a little book i bought. to cut to the chase, they turned out rather...terrible. well not really terrible in the sense of inedible, but they didn't know whether they wanted to be soft and chewy, or crisp and crunchy. that seems to be a dilemma most confectionary are doomed to experience. oh the choices!

and the smell of cinnamon was overpowering and gave me a headache. plus it made me feel like puking several times. eew.

point is, i now have a jar of monstrous cookies in my kitchen. well not my kitchen really. it's the kitchen in the house i live in. but anyways, i think i'm gonna stay away from anything cinnamon-containing in future. or at least anything with more than 1/2 a tsp of the vile substance.

but on to happier records, i was, or i imagine i was, successful at some plain cookies dipped in melted chocolate. the cookies had a crumbly texture, and melted in the mouth cos of the corn flour in it. and the butter, a shameless amount the recipe called for, made the cookies sooooper dooooper fragrant. on the other hand, i probably should have made the cookies flatter, taste better and nicer to bite into that way.

and i probably should have dipped them into nicer chocolate, i ran out of my Hershey's semi-sweet one and scavenged the fridge, discovering boxes of unwanted chocolates that i happily threw into the melting pot. yucks. lesson learnt. i'm not melting anything that isn't meant for coating or baking anymore.

on to future voyages, i shall try a spicy oatmeal cookie which is supposed to be beeeg and soft. sounds darned good. except for the 1 tsp of cinnamon i need to add. think i'm substituting that for nutmeg and ginger. maybe just a pinch for a subtle flavour.

and one last, i think i prefer cooking to baking. the only drawback i can think of right now of cooking is that the ingredients are usually perishable, and the ingredients are hard to find in singapore. like how hard it is to find a leg of lamb in supermarkets and wet markets.

you don't need to be so bloody precise in baking as you do in cooking. can you imagine jamie oliver baking!??! he'd be throwing in handfuls of this, a pinch of that, a good glug of this, and just a bit of something else. the pastry will probably turn out looking a sad mess. plus cooking yields savoury stuff, much easier to eat than sweet ones cos you don't get sick of eating them, as you do get sick of eating a handful of cookies.

cooking looks so much cooler anyhoo, with the steaming and sizzling and fervent chopping and tossing. baking looks so wussy and nancy. no fire, no flame, no intensity. just mix and chuck into the oven, see what comes out in a while.

oh well, but for now, since time and ingredients are scarce, i'm choosing baking.