Wednesday, April 22, 2020

It’s All About the Bake r...

    Yesterday, was the day. My subscription twenty-five pound bag of gluten-free flour came, and my son requested a carrot cake. Now, before you think, like I would with a different individual, “Wow, they are amazing! They’re making a cake from scratch.” let me introduce myself. I am a model representative of flopped bakes — cookie bars that never seem to solidify and baked in peaks on what should be flat surfaces are my normal. Poor children. For me, however, this is really a blessing because while I may flop a bake like no other, simultaneously, for every fiasco, I dream about cake eighty times, sometimes, mid-flight of stairs: It’s really imperative to my health that I plateau at such baking basics.
    If this deficiency, therefore, inspires an image of a woman applauding every time a person bakes a cake and even decorates it with icing that fits over the cake and holds to it — well done — it is me. “Oh Dear! Paul and Mary! Y’all are so sweet. A little dry? But does it, also, crumble?”
    And yet for every one hundred disasters of a bake there is a miracle — where by no power of my doing; for the Lord knows, my merit in putting the ingredients together are really on my part arbitrary and having no discrimination — a bake turns out well. This happened on Easter. Mercies never cease.
     Alas, on Easter this carrot cake was one fine cake, but not twice does lightening strike! Yesterday, it peaked and was definitely, too, dry.
    Baking is such a humbling pastime. It goes in the oven, and I pray that the Lord will have mercy and help it. 
    I don’t really mind, when my bakes go awry. Every time, I look at my failed desserts, I see Jesus, like not physically — spiritually. In failed desserts? Yes. 
    He is so perfect and so good. There isn’t a blemish in him, and even on my best behavior and with my best works and best bakes, I am confident that the difference between his holiness and my best acts are engulfed with such a great chasm that there is not a question of whether I am good or good enough or not. It is obvious that we’re going to need a Substitute here. Put my bakes next to any good baker, and you will see my bakes will just never do. No restaurant could ever think of serving them, unless they intentioned to go under, and then no one could call that company good. I would need a substitutionary baker. 
   And while this post is, primarily, about a recipe that I have not even mentioned yet, I, recently, read a book called, Women of the Word by Jen Wilkin (and it’s a pretty basic study the Word book that I really liked and will probably have all my kids read, whether they are women or not), and she right off says something that will change my Bible reading, hopefully, forever. She says, “I approached my study time asking the wrong questions. I read the Bible asking, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What should I do?’ And the Bible did answer these in places...But the questions I was asking revealed that I held a subtle misunderstanding about the very nature of the Bible: I believed the purpose of the Bible was to help me...The Bible does tell us who we are and what we should do, but it does so through the lens of who God is...So, when I read that God is long suffering, I realize I am not long suffering...A vision of God high and lifted up reveals to me my sin and increases my love for him.”
    This is me. This is my baking, but Sally’s Baking Addiction’s Super Moist Carrot Cake recipe, even the title mocks me, linked below, is sound — in the hands of a true baker. Enjoy! 🙌🏻 😂





2 comments:

  1. You are fantastic dear friend. Thank you for this delightful read! And I can't wait to try to make this delicious gluten-free creation and to join you in your baking highs and lows, knowing that I made the terrible mistake of introducing Camden to Paul Hollywood and now his favorite line to quote in his most British and simultaneously Eeyoreish voice is "It's a shame." hahahaha Love you!

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  2. My carrots finally were available from Aldi! Time to try my hand at this cake!

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