Baking Blog!

Thursdays shouldn’t be my favorite days. I have my first class at 9:30, unlike my Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule, that doesn’t start until my first class at eleven, which means I’m usually up by eight. I’m not a morning person, so the process of waking up usually hitting the snooze button a few times, throwing my phone off the top of my bunk bed, and ingesting an unhealthy amount of flavored coffee with enough sugar to send a normal person into a diabetic coma.  But thanks to my afternoon writing center shift, Thursdays are definitely in the running for best weekday.

From one to two each week, I get paid to bake. And every week, it’s definitely an adventure. To understand, I have to explain what we’re working with.

The oven is about the size of an Easy-Bake oven, and although it can only bake one small cookie sheet or muffin tin at a time, it works just as well as any normal sized stove (it looks kind of like this):

There’s also a microwave, two bread making machines, a toaster, and a griddle at my disposal, though I’ve only been brave enough to test out the bread maker once.

Then there’s the challenge of the ingredients. I never know what’s going to be in the WC kitchen. Some weeks I’ll look in the fridge and be greeted with the pleasant surprise of a full gallon of milk, a carton of eggs, sticks of butter, and multiple packages of cream cheese, and the pantry will be stocked with jars of peanut butter and containers of sugar. If I’m really lucky there’ll be a bag of chocolate chips. Other weeks, I’ll find myself thinking of what to make with flour, one egg, and some instant oatmeal.

This week, as I entered the kitchen, the first thing I noticed was a full container of brown sugar. YES! In the fridge: enough milk to fill a couple cups and a pound of butter. No eggs, but cookies were still definitely doable.

Thirty minutes later, I managed to produce a couple dozen (hopefully edible) sugar cookies with a brown sugar and maple syrup glaze on top. I didn’t take a picture, but they looked something like this: (okay maybe not as good as these do, but you get the point.)

There have been days where the cooking gods frowned down at me…like that one time that some of the batter from the cupcakes I was making fell onto the bottom of the oven, caught on fire, and filled the writing center with smoke and a smell pretty similar to burning rubber. Or that other time when I tried to make a cake but no matter how long I left it in the oven, it didn’t cook through. So I was just happy that something turned out today, and that I didn’t have to worry about setting the writing center on fire.

So basically (since I’m rambling), it IS possible to make pretty much anything in the WC kitchen. I’ve seen cupcakes, pies, granola, cookies, and brownies coming out of that tiny oven. My advice: find out when the bakers are working (there’s at least eight of us on the schedule), show up right at the end of their shift, grab a cup of coffee, and a cookie/brownie/whatever, and I promise, your day will instantly be ten times better than it already was!

  - Rachel Epperly