Baking and Calculus

I like to think I enjoy cooking. It started with sandwiches a few years ago when a friend introduced me to some amazing possibilities. Pear? Brie? Avocado? Hummus? All of these things were alien to me at the time, but planted inside me a seed which rather than springing from my stomach and attacking all of those around, grew into a curiosity of the basic foods I grew up with. I have ventured into loafs, cupcakes, jell-oes (is that the plural? maybe jell-i). Today I tackled the bundt cake.

Baking, I should say, is as simple as assembling IKEA furniture. Follow the instructions exactly as represented by the androgynous characters in the wordless manual and you're set. Stray from these, though, and you are doomed to failure. Your bed will fall apart from under you, your cornbread will look like white pizza vomit, your room will catch on fire.

The recipe was simple enough. A peach ginger bundt. It has peaches, ginger, and a bunch of other things that typically go into desserts: flour, sugar, baking powder, blah blah blah. I preheated the oven, I made my badder, and I greased my pan. Thing is, the recipe called for a 10 inch bundt pan, I had a tray with 6 mini-bundts. I thought I could do a bit of relatively simple calculus to get my proportions about right. Turns out, I suck at calculus. I like to think that this problem was beyond calculus. Newton himself would have given up math to pursue his passion for balsa wood jewelry box making had he been posed with a similar task. In the end, I simply had too much badder, not enough bundt pan. Within minutes of being sent off into the oven for baking, my mini-bundts exploded past the rims of their tiny containers like love handles over a pair of tight jeans.

They taste fine, but they look ridiculous. Like muffins with intricately decorated round bottoms leaving them vulnerable to tipping over onto their sides where the sticky frosting will inevitably pick up whatever debris is on the surface below. Or like buoys, rocking back and forth like an opossum trying to eat my trash, blinded by the afternoon sun.

Is there a lesson in here somewhere? Probably, but I now have 4 bundts left in the kitchen, 2 jogging through my digestive tract, and a sugar rush that probably won't let me sleep till after the ShamWow commercials come on in full force.

Mac and cheese, you're next!