Baking a mess

I feel it only fair to tell you that I am Portuguese. I was raised in a very traditional Portuguese home where we sat down to dinner and ate dishes with lots of fish, cabbage and chick peas while my father rattled off in Portuguese while gesticulating A LOT. I also need to inform you that my mother was the only woman (on the face of the entire planet) in a Portuguese home, to ban her daughter from the kitchen. (I don’t want to talk about it). So here I am 34 years of age and tragically I possess no cooking or baking skills.
So as a mom who would firmly stand-OUT as a complete write-off at the annual bake-off, I decide that I will tentatively throw myself head first into baking. I run to Woolworths and buy the trusted, already put together, no mess, no fuss, a blind person could do this with their eyes shut, biscuit mix.
I have no doubt that plenty of scorn will be heaped upon my already over-spilling plate of shame because I don’t know how to bake.
To top it all off, mothers within a 500 000 km radius of Educare can tell a ready-mix from a “oh I just whipped this up in five minutes on my way back from the toilet” cake, but I am willing to take the scorn with an extra scoop of disgust if it means I won’t put anyone in hospital.
I run home and call for my little helper. “Gabe” I shout, “do you want to bake?” “Bakey bakey bakey cakey” says my very excited nuclear bomb as he arrives in the kitchen amid a flourish of Orca whales and sharks toys.
Eyes sparkling and cheeks all flushed from excitement, and his hot bath, Gabe starts demanding to see what I will be putting on top of the small, perfectly rounded (thanks to small shot glasses) mortar bricks (biscuits) I plan on building in the oven.
I take out little pink, purple and blue flowers with purple, yellow and pink butterflies and I am advised that “no girls can have my bikits mom”. First of all I don’t know how the cute flowers and butterflies found their way into our kitchen cupboard and secondly, I don’t know if I want the “bikits” leaving our house so I assure my little “girls are yuch” advisor that no girls will be having his biscuits. In fact, I am almost certain they will not be fit for human consumption.
We measure out the butter and cream it. That is a ton of fun, but when I rub butter on the baking tin Gabe rubs butter all over the counter.
I add the biscuit mix and start using that thing that you plug into the wall and it does all the whipping for you…the blender, the mixer, the hand blender/mixer? Gabe holds that for me, some mix ends up on the wall so he licks it off, I reprimand him and he promptly advises me to “stop making noise mommy”…Crikey, who is this kid?
I crack open an egg that ends up on the floor so I take a crack at another, add it to my mixture on the wall and after much whipping and praying, it starts turning into dough! Terrified I check the box and apparently this is what is actually supposed to happen with biscuit mixture!
“Clay clay, wanna build a car” screams mommy’s little helper, but I manage to divert his attention with a shot glass and convince him that making little round Frisbees is so much more fun than building a super cool sports car with front and rear suspension, drive shafts and a booster on the bonnet. Gabe ignorantly agrees.
The box says leave in for 8-10 minutes, I leave them in for 8, then 10..they still feel slightly soft in the middle so I leave them in for 12 minutes, then 15…okay so they’re still slightly soft but I take them out.
Suddenly, “surfs up mom!” shouts my wall licker while trying to get his fingers into the ‘Island Style’ salute. In doing so, he slips on a bit of egg I missed on the floor. I drop everything to check that he hasn't broken any bones and while I stress he shouts “wipeout!” with a huge grin on his face.
I frantically wipe up the egg and hope the biscuits have not turned to stone. No, but they are a golden, stoney brown and I VERY proudly put them out on display for dad to see when he gets home.
18:00: Dad arrives home and, to my utter disgust, is clearly shocked and surprised at my baking skills, so much so, that I have to ask him to close his mouth on more than one occasion.
Sadly by the time dad arrived home the biscuits had hardened into miniature rounds of cement. Gabe, in his very tactful toddler manner, wanted very little to do with them but was happy to scrape the flowers and butterflies off the cement tops with his teeth and discard the rest down the toilet, where I happened to find them floating with several Orca’s and sharks also trying to climb out the bowl at some stage I’m sure.
So, I stood by proudly and watched father and son play Frisbee with my R20 box of ready to mix, fail proof, biscuit mixture.