A few words about the road to success. And baked goods.

This past Saturday I was in a major cooking/baking mood - to celebrate I decided to finally bake the soft pretzel recipe I had stuck to my fridge months before. I glanced through the ingredients and instructions and figured it would be no problem. After all, if I can make kick-ass pies, cookies and muffins at the drop of a hat, pretzels should be easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.

I was confident about my first batch of dough - it came out just the way the recipe intended, and I was excited to begin the rising process.

You can imagine my surprise when I returned in an hour and saw that the dough hadn't grown.

At all.

Not even a little.

Not one to give up that easily, I disposed of the stubborn first batch and staunchly re-made the dough, making sure to more carefully follow the instructions in case I was missing something. With encouragement from Brian (my husband), I totally thought I had it this time. When the microwave timer went off (while I was watching Gilmore Girls - awesome show, by the way!) I lept off of the couch and ran to the bowl, eagerly anticipating the mammoth size of the dough.

However, what I saw made me want to throw sharp, pointy objects violently into a Scott Walker voodoo doll; once again, the damn dough didn't rise at all. It just sat there, a patronizing blob at the bottom of the giant bowl. I could have sworn I heard the yeast pointing and laughing at my feeble attempts to make it rise.

Can't you see how evil it was?!

At this point I got really depressed and felt like an utter failure. I gave up on my grand pretzel-making adventure and called it a night.

The next morning I decided to give it one last try. I looked over the recipe yet again, and discovered that, although I had altered the ingredients list to reflect half the original recipe, the instructions did not show the change. So, instead of using a half teaspoon of sugar for the starter, I put twice as much in as I was supposed to - no wonder the dough didn't rise! It was the equivalent of providing a huge buffet to a bunch of hibernating bears; they feasted so fast and got so full that the yeast had no energy left to actually dig in when it counted.

I excitedly mixed everything together, wrapped up the dough, and waited for one hour. This time the dough grew! Not by much, but it far surpassed the pitiful glob it was the night before. I rolled it out and baked about six pretzels of assorted shapes and sizes - and they turned out great! A bit too dense, truth be told, but nothing I can't fix in future baking endeavours.

It was then that I thought to myself: baking pretzels is a lot like mastering photography and life. It may seem really easy at first, but as with any craft you want to perfect, you constantly have to work at it. Failure is a given - in fact, Brian likens it to the first step on the long and winding road to success.
And did I ever have a success with these yummylicious pretzels. As the old adage goes, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again!





P.S. - Blogspot.com, you really need to stop overriding my paragraph spacing. It's really pissing me off; I had this beautifully-written post and I had to delete and re-type it because you didn't want to behave. Not. cool.