Sometimes, one might find oneself drinking rum out of a measuring cup…
…even if one has used that measuring cup to measure applesauce before the rum.
And one might make some overly salty buttercream frosting with cocoa that requires a lot of tasting directly from the bowl even though it doesn’t taste particularly good, under the guise of “checking to see if it’s good.” It’s not good.
If you add enough rum, it gets better.
And these ugly, angry, chocolate-rum muffin-cakes that one stirred together with only ratios, sans recipes, might be in the oven. They might never be fully baked, but it will be okay because they are vegan and therefore won’t kill you as easily. Plus, they contain so much rum that pretty much nothing bad could happen to you as a result of consuming one. These are the ugly cakes you want when you are shipwrecked.
This is angry baking. Angry nights when you don’t want to use your fancy expensive camera and your art school degree to photograph your ugly, angry snack food that you don’t even want to EAT now that you’ve made it. Nights when you are trying not to be nice and tell someone what you think of them and their liar-liar-liarness and their endless mooching. Nights when you would like to call your family, not to check in but to tell them that THEY ARE RUINING THEIR LIVES and most of all you are glad you escaped their endless maze of mistakes.
Baking is particularly well-suited to angry cooking. Baked goods don’t fight back by sputtering up in your face like blurping polenta or sauces and soups. They’re pretty tough to burn, even tougher to ruin – the overbaked can find a home in a bread pudding or atop ice cream, the underbaked…well, put them back in and finish baking them, and the strangely flavored can be fixed with an endless array of toppings. You can bake by stirring a bunch of things in a bowl until they’re of a batter-ish consistency and putting them in a (buttered and probably floured, for God’s sake) pan, then putting the pan in a 350º oven until the proverbial inserted toothpick comes out clean, and you will end up with SOMETHING.
Just watch. I might make a lemon anise cream and fill these ugly cakes with it BEFORE I top them with the unintentionally salty frosting.
Oh, I might.
And while you are angrily stirring, you might forget some of the annoyances of the day – the endless parade of grammatical errors inflicted upon your poor ears and eyes, the lying and swindling and disappointments (OH, THE DISAPPOINTMENTS), the dashed-ish dreams and the doors that seem to be closing, closing, closing.
You might even consider forgiving someone for their abhorrent acts. But then you will remove the angry muffin-cakes from the oven…
…and even a smear of rummy frosting won’t fix the horror that is this ugly, tiny, most, chocolatey, chia-studded muffin-cake.
And so you will renew your grudges all over again, in a heap of selfish self-pity. While pitying, you may contemplate the sorrows of those who truly have a worse lot in life than you do – the hungry, the sick, the poor, the disadvantaged, the third world children in commercials who have neither water to drink nor food to eat; you may then dismiss their concerns as entirely IRRELEVANT to the pity at hand, because PLENTY of people feel sorry for those people and want to help them but no one, NO ONE feels sorry for you.
And you may or may not go order yourself something from 1 800 flowers.com because you are just that selfish tonight, and because the flowers are better for you than the rum you may or may not have been guzzling. With milk and Kahlua. Don’t judge.
Or, if you must judge, take pity on me and my ugly, angry cakes.
(PS – Angry baking may not really help anything, but sometimes even a little bit of catharsis goes a long way. As does a 4 mile run on the treadmill, even if you weren’t supposed to run two days back to back. Plus, if you make healthy goo like these mufin-cakes – they are mostly chia, flax, raw cacao powder, and …rum – you won’t worry about scarfing a few while blogging.)