Squirrelly

I am officially an alcoholic. In my defense, if the bottle hadn't already been open I wouldn't have poured a glass and found myself drinking away my frustration, alone, in the middle of the afternoon.

But I have been mixing and stirring and whirring like a baking tornado these last 48 hours, trying to use up the last of my gluten free flours so I will have muffins and bread this summer and not be throwing any out before I leave the continent.

Yesterday went really well. I made, cinnamon bread, hamburger buns (soooo good, I can't wait to have an actual meat-on-bread burger this summer!), banana hemp muffins (they're reminiscent of bran muffins actually-not exciting but filling and nourishing and great for breakfast in my kayak), teff banana bread and, my new favourite, rhubarb muffins. Preliminary samples indicate everything turned out well so I had no reason to believe today would not be a smashing success. The fact that I was planning yeast breads for today was undaunting. After all, I made buns yesterday without a hint of trouble. I am getting better at this.

Instead of sticking with my tried and true Sorghum bread recipe, the rhubarb muffins were such a success I decided to try the beautiful looking teff and hemp sandwich breads. I proofed my yeast for both breads before mixing so I know it wasn't the yeast but neither turned out well at all.

The hemp bread was ridiculous even last night when I was reading it. It seemed like far too much flour for the amount of liquid but nobody mentioned having any problems in the comment section so I fearlessly forged ahead. After adding the liquid to the flours however it became frighteningly evident my flour was parched. I ended up adding another 2 cups and finally had a lump of dough that handled like a very stiff bread dough but my experience with gluten free baking tells me bread batter should be more like cake batter. The fact that the recipe itself uses the phrase "spoon into a prepared pan" tells me that a stiff dough was not the goal but I foolishly decided that, having already doubled the amount of water, I could not possibly add more. I also now had enough dough for two loaves.

Needless to say neither of them turned out although I've decided I can make them palatable, at least while they're fresh, with a nice soft mozzarella cheese.

I haven't tried the teff loaf yet but it also looks nothing like the picture.

This, of course, is why there are no baking shows on the Food Network. Cooking shows abound, but baking? It's too risky. You may have baked something ten times without trouble and then, one day- maybe you slept wrong, maybe you had a fight, maybe you fell in love and your mind is wandering- whatever the reason and you may never know, it will flop. And there is no room for failure on the chattering box. TV is no place for reality.

But this is something I had to accept when I had to learn to bake without gluten. It was hard at first. Not only did it contradict my perfectionist nature, a trait that had previously manifest itself neatly in my reliably edible baking, but it defied my innate Mennonite cheapness. Gluten free flours are high maintenance diva ingredients- outrageously expensive and demanding- and when you're used to being adept at something but find yourself failing more than you succeed, it's tempting to give up.

Today I decided to make one more batch of (bigger) buns rather than admit defeat and, once my yeast was proofing, I mixed my flours then set out to mix the wet ingredients. I cracked the first egg open and watched the yolk splat satisfactorily when it hit the bottom of the bowl. I was already reaching for the second egg before I realized the recipe called for egg whites not eggs. (I actually tried to separate it out of that bowl, go on picture it, before accepting it was a lost cause.

This is when I went back to the fridge to make sure that these really were the last three eggs and noticed the bottle of wine that had been opened but not nearly finished on Saturday night. There were definitely no more eggs so I poured myself a glass of wine. It did, after all, need to be drunk before the weekend and couldn't really be brought to the lake. I was taking my first sip when I spotted the yeast atop the warming oven, grown so high it was about to spill over the bowl.

Already feeling fortified, I separated half the egg and carried on. My brother dropped in for a visit just as I was popping the finished product in the oven and he kept me company while I finished the bottle. Does finishing the bottle in good company mean I'm not really a lush? Because if the beautiful buns can be entered into evidence, it certainly helped my baking mojo.