Recipes

I have this adorable baby girl.  I mean, she has been a showstopper since the day she was born.  She is now 14yrs old, so I am not allowed to say she is my baby girl.  I am also not allowed to say she is adorable.   Or, a showstopper.   Or, really even talk about her at anytime.  For any reason.  End of story.  Sooooo, if we could just keep this little story between you and me that would be great…

The afore mentioned wonderful, and not sassy at all sweetheart LOVES to bake.  Bella, actually LOVES all things culinary.  I wouldn’t doubt that if at some point we see her on Iron Chef or Beat Bobby Flay; she’s that good! And, quickly on her way to becoming an expert.  This means, she is also an expert at destroying my kitchen!

She’s been working at it since she was a toddler!

The other day she came to me and asked if she could bake some cookies.  Of course, I said yes!  Who doesn’t want cookies they don’t have to bake?!

She mixed.  Kitchen destroyed.  Cookies delicious.  End of story.  Except it’s not…

I walked into the kitchen just as the first batch came out of the oven.  They smelled so good!  But, they didn’t look quite right, and she knew she had made a mistake somewhere along the way.  She was so upset and trying to figure out what went wrong.  I asked her some questions, checked the oven temp, made sure she had remembered that on my cookie recipe it says 3 cups of sugar but it really means 3 cups of flour (it’s an old, hand copied recipe from my mom), but she insisted she had done it all right.  Except, that she didn’t…here’s a little back story.

A couple of months ago, when we made cookies together, we were out of butter.  The recipe calls for butter and shortening so we increased the amount of shortening and went on our merry way…back to the present.

When we were out baking soda she substituted baking powder. Two white powders; no big deal.  But, she not only substituted the soda for powder she increased the amount of powder to make up for the lacking soda.  She figured we had done that last time so it must be okay to do it this time too.  It wasn’t…

It was a mistake and she desperately wanted to fix it.  Could we just get some soda and add it to the remaining unbaked dough?  Was it possible to figure out what we could substitute for the missing soda?  Could we just start over?

I tried to explain the reasons we couldn’t fix it.  That we had no idea how much to put in the remaining dough; even if we had the soda.  That we had no baking soda.  That you can’t just put extra baking powder in; that changes the dough too.  And, then I asked why she didn’t come to me when she realized the problem?  I was just downstairs.  But, she didn’t want to bug me and thought she had figured out the solution on her own.

Yep, baby girl I know exactly how you feel. 

She didn’t.  We couldn’t.  We cleaned.  No cookies.

I do this ALL the time.  I have it all figured out.  I can do it on my own.  I don’t want to bug anyone with my little problems.  I have done these same things over and over so of course I can figure it out on my own this time.  Except I can’t…

I screw it up.  I try to fix it.  It ends up badly.

How can I forget that He is as close as the mention of His name?  Why do I overlook how He gives us every possible solution on the pages of His Word?  Even after I have made complete mess and tried to fix my  problems in my own way (which in turn usually makes a bigger mess, right?), He is still right there with me in the mess.  Jesus takes my hand and helps me clean up.

I wish I could tell you that I always remember to ask first.  Or, that my Bible is worn out because with every little problem I am searching through the pages to find the answer.  But, I can’t.  I can tell you that I am trying, and that admitting I don’t have the answers gets a little easier each time I actually DO admit I don’t have all the answers.

I am going to choose happy this week because the love He has for me is so great and reaches so far that He found me in a messy kitchen, hungry for cookies, baking with Bella.  He found me and reminded me that I don’t have to figure it out all on my own and it was all because Bella wanted to bake cookies 🙂