I was so excited about my baking the other day. Finally some Christmas preparation that doesn’t involve decorations held captive aboard a ship somewhere on the South China Sea. Fool proof. Cannot go wrong.
So I’d bought the saffron, the flour, the yeast and all other ingredients and was getting the dough ready in time for the kids to help me actually bake when they got home from school.
Hmm…something is not right here, I thought to myself, still calm at this stage. The saffron though it smelled right (though faint) was not yellow enough. But, since I had bought it at a market where the embassy chefs shop I stupidly thought they would not try to cheat you. I mean, how stupid are you to try to do that? You will lose business and most importantly your reputation and people will go shop at the next stall where they sell exactly the same things as you do.
So I proceeded mixing everything and left it to rise.
45 minutes later, a pasty grey/white rock hard lump waited for me, completely without the Christmassy saffron smell that I expected. I tried to roll it out, making the infinity eight shapes but to no avail. I tried to salvage it, adding cinnamon and sugar, making it into cinnamon buns but out of the oven came tiny, greyish, disgustingly disappointing not worthy to be called baked goods.
At this stage when I was seriously pissed off my mother Skype me and caught me in the action.
“Oh, what’s wrong?” she almost chuckles while I curse away and show her the horrible result of my labor.
What to say? I’ve felt like cursing ever since (and I do). It turns out the flour was not the right kind of flour though I never figured out which kind of flour it actually was , the yeast (though brand new) was dead and despite trying to save these scentless, greyish disgusting lumps of produits de boulangerie, in the end; I had to throw them all away.
Thank God for wine.
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