The dark side of baking

Oh yes, there most definitely is one!

Everyone whispers about how it's cheaper, it tastes better than store-bought, it's more environmentally friendly (no packaging as such and all that goes with that), it's transparent in that you know exactly what's gone into it ... so many good things about baking that make you want to embrace your inner cookie/cake/slice producer.

But. That dark side. Oh, my friends. The cunning evil that lurks just around the corner when you look for that recipe that you just feeling like making today.

People don't talk about when you come across a classic recipe that turns something out the way that something always should have been but you've never experienced it, and that said something will delight your senses so much you will eat the entire batch of whatever it is, even though you know how much butter and sugar was involved. Conscience means nothing.

Who knew ginger crunch could actually be crunchy? Skinny crunchy ginger crunch with just a hint of ginger icing on top ... it's no wonder I don't fit my clothes.

(On an unrelated topic - my kid woke me up at 3.30am this morning for a feed. Which was fine. Except, by the time I stumbled up the hall to mix up his colic powder and then stumbled back down to his room, tripping over both guard dogs along the way, he decided he wasn't hungry after all and he'd see me in another 2 hours, thanks all the same. Very uncool behaviour that. He only gets to live another day because he giggled at me when I changed his nappy when he eventually did get up.)

(On another unrelated topic. Or, unrelated to the main topic, related to unrelated bracketed above ... They tell you not to shake a baby, which, for all intents and purposes seems sensible advice, but how does one tell a baby not to shake itself? We took Cuinn to the park last night, and after a bit of a cool breeze got up, we put a hat on him for the first time (he looked like a smurf. Very cute, but of course we failed to get a photo. We're useless), while he was asleep in his front pack. He woke as we were getting in the car, decided he had a strong aversion to the hats and since he has no co-ordination whatsoever to deal with it, he just started shaking his head furiously from side to side in the hope that that would dislodge it. The hat that is, not the head, although potentially it could have also dislodged the head, he was shaking it that hard. Very funny)

(And what the hell - spectacularly dreadful photos (even worse, I had to make them huge so you can see. Sort of), unflattering to hell and back, I have no idea how to deal with red-eye and the background is a tip, but check out Cuinn poking at and laughing at himself n(well, potentially both are at me, but there is laughing and poking and that's the point - kiddly development!) in the mirror.

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