Strawberries Everywhere

Sometimes, it is through baking that I learn tremendously, deeply important life lessons.  I often have Eureka moments like our little Strawberry Shortcake is having in the photo above.  This doesn’t mean that I put them into practice, but simply that baking often opens my eyes to things that should be so obvious but that have eluded me for years.

This weekend, my husband and I bravely packed up our children and headed for the Strawberry Festival in a neighboring town.  I say bravely because this excursion meant several scary things: 1) our children would be up well past bedtime 2) I left the kitchen a mess because we were short on time, and being the compulsively neat person that I am, this is very stressful for me 3) the traffic was horrible and 4) we knew that the moment we walked through the entrance gate, our children would bombard us with requests for $25 armbands to ride every right, cotton candy, popcorn, crafts and maybe even an Andersen window from the strangely present Andersen window booth.  Our children are relentless and want absolutely everything that they see at carnivals.

So, armed with this knowledge, J and I took a deep breath, squared ourselves for the ensuing battle and went in.  I have to admit that we actually had a good time.  We rode some rides, we negotiated down to one bag of cotton candy for the entire family to split, and we left to watch the fireworks from the parking lot.  Oh yes, and a swinger couple propositioned us, which was weird and really funny, since that’s so not us. While it was nice to have family time and to see my children so blissfully happy and excited about gunpowder exploding in the sky, I have to admit that I could think of one thing and one thing only: strawberry shortcake.  Naturally, the highlight of a strawberry festival is the shortcake.  There were enormous big-top sized tents devoted to it, transient halls filled with sweaty people stuffing themselves with blobs of dry cakes, sweetened strawberries and piles of light, whipped cream.  I salivated, and as we walked past, I looked wistfully over my shoulder.  Oh to partake!

Instead, we drove home after the fireworks with one child resting her sleeping head on her knee despite her seatbelt and the other screaming at the top of her lungs that it was so unfair that the fireworks display had started 30 minutes late and only lasted for 10.  She seemed to have forgotten that we graciously allowed her to stay up four hours past her bedtime and that we had spent what felt like a month’s salary on junk food and crappy stuffed animal.  For the record, all of those animals have already been cast off and will probably end up at the thrift store next week.

As you can imagine, I gratefully fell into bed that night and dreamt peacefully of the days that I could eat unabashedly.  I awoke determined to make myself some of that shortcake if it killed me.  Now, there is nothing more American than shortcake made from Bisquik, sorry apple pie.  So, I naturally surmised that I  could not possibly make allergy-free shortcake from scratch but that I had to make it from a gluten-free pancake mix.  Silly me, this was a stupid idea, because it was terrible! Actually, that’s not at all true.  I used Arrowhead Mills pancake mix, so the dough actually tasted just like Dunkin Donuts donuts, but the shortcakes were a disaster.  And it was here that the life lesson came in.

I haven’t eaten dough in years.  I’m not a fan of raw bean flours (good for the waistline but not for the taste buds), so I usually don’t taste as I go.  However, this had no bean in it, so I happily licked my fingers after I mixed.  My whole life has been a pursuit of perfection, complete with black and white thinking as stark as that on top of my favorite cookies.  I might have a great hair day, but if I have a pimple, it doesn’t matter, I might as well go back to bed.  Last week, I managed to pay all of the bills, get the kids to school on time and cook dinner, but that day sticks with me, because it was the one day that I didn’t make it to the gym.  Maybe, I thought , just maybe life is like this shortcake that refused to brown or develop a crumb, perhaps this shortcake is a metaphor for my life.  OK, so it wasn’t perfect, and I would never put that recipe in a book, but for what it was, a deliciously spiced dough, it was out of this world, all gooey and cinnamon-y and yummy.  So it’s summer and I have a spare tire this year.  Maybe it’s ok; maybe there is more to me than that roll of fat.  Maybe I serve my purpose in my own and in others’ lives just as this messed up dough was serving on my countertop.  I don’t always hit the ball out of the park, but I’m enough.  This dough was enough; it sated my sweet tooth, and I love dough.  Maybe people can be equally as “enough”, myself included.

So, I had my moment of zen for the weekend.  Don’t be fooled.  I snapped out of this philosophical frame of mind less than thirty seconds later and set to the next task at hand: steak.  After all, I was having company, and dinner had to be perfect.