im procrastinating so i will tell the story.
despite the incident in question happening about a year and a half ago, it has two preceding incidents, the contents of which are needed in order to understand the full scale of the bread pudding incident.
1) i recently found out i have what was described to me as “the worst case of adhd that (my therapist) had ever seen”, totally unmedicated and,
2) i cannot reliably count to ten.
so a couple years ago, i tried to get into box-baking. my husband is an incredible baker, and has made some awesome things (including one time a pancake-based strawberry shortcake for my birthday because i hate cake? he’s a gem) but he doesnt always have energy to bake and i crave brownies literally at every minute of every hour of every day, so i was like ok sick ill bake box brownies. thats easy. (i have since, with a liberal amount of help, learned how to reliably box bake precisely one brand of brownie)
the first time, i misread the instructions and made them with the oil and water reversed and only one egg. they were inedible. the second time i realized we had no eggs ¾ of the way through, panicked, put in applesauce but only half the required applesauce, and they came out (mostly) inedible.
so at the time my sister sensibly decided “you cannot bake any more” and i sensibly agreed with her.
last year in the deep swings of my masters-induced depression i figured i had forgotten about a loaf of french bread in my fridge for weeks and it was approximately the same hardness as a stone. i should use it for something! bread pudding. that is what you use stale bread for.
i cook to taste—i rarely use recipes, because of the aforementioned “i have the attention span of a gnat and i cannot count to ten” so using a recipe? pretty much useless. this does not work to bake. so i googled a recipe, figured, okay, i can get the ingredients, and pretty much guess? i closed the recipe immediately afterward, and forgot my laptop even existed within minutes.
things bread pudding requires: stale bread. butter. milk. sugar. cinnamon. raisins. eggs. vanilla. and, if you are southern™, alcohol.
things i had in the house: stale bread. margarine. sugar. pumpkin spice. one egg. vanilla. alcohol.
first i broke up the bread. with a hammer! like you do, for weeks-old french bread. i put it all in a casserole dish, because that was what was clean. no milk? water is fine! throw that shit in! how much water? i dont know. enough to get it wet! submerge all the ingredients. how much sugar? i don’t know. the recipe said brown sugar.
me: can i use the brown sugar to make bread pudding?
james: sure. but don’t use much.
me: ok. (takes less than a teaspoon of brown sugar, one of the big-ish clumps) that’s enough, right? throw that in there. that’s enough sugar! i don’t need more white sugar.
pumpkin spice is essentially cinnamon! can’t use too much vanilla. just shake a little bit in there. that’s good, that’s enough. how much was that? two drops? plenty! that’s how much vanilla it needs, right? how much margarine? i don’t know! i closed the recipe. let’s get three or four big pats. i don’t have any stick margarine. crack that egg in there.
can’t forget the whiskey! just slop some in there. i’m southern. a dollop? a dollop. a dollop sounds right.
what temperature do you cook bread budding at? i don’t know. this casserole dish is only barely like, a tiny bit full. just coating the bottom. not much, then. 250 is probably right?
and then i forgot i was cooking until the kitchen began to smell.
the object which was removed from the oven was approximately the same size and density as a bowl full of very, very burned sand. two square inches of it was the correct texture for bread pudding—i.e, soft, squishy. the rest of it was as like unto hardened lava, and the same color. a single taste revealed it to taste like wet, disgusting bread or almost sort of exactly-unlike-bread-pudding but in the saddest way imaginable, the potential had been there, and had not been achieved. the brown sugar had not even dissolved it was just there. in a chunk. burned into the bread. it all smelled strongly of whiskey. it took about three weeks to soak totally off of my casserole dish, full of daily-replaced soapy boiling water.
so i’m not allowed to bake any more.
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