If You're Going to Wing It, You Better Have Feathers.

i love cooking. until recently, the only thing you might catch me baking was cookies and the occasional bread item, but those instances were rare. i believe i've mentioned this before: i hate measuring. i hate being confined by almost anything in life; recipes and measuring cups are no exception. i love the freedom that comes with cooking-- there is no exact science to making a skillet meal or cooking pasta. you can add nearly anything you want to an enchilada or a salad, even a salad dressing. substitutes and eyeballed amounts don't have the tendency to ruin meals the same way they can kill a baked good.

today i made a whole wheat soda bread. some things to note about whole wheat: it soaks in much more water than regular flour and it is STICKY. if you don't put in enough flour, there is no hope for your poor hands. another downside to not adding enough flour: your cook time will increase and you may not realize it, resulting in a deflated, gooey center. and not the good kind of gooey! whole wheat does, however, make delicious breads. and healthy ones! so it's well worth the trial and errors :)

while the whole wheat bread was baking i ventured into scones. the recipe wasn't nearly as difficult as i imagined it had to be given the flavors, textures, and colors you find in scones. 

i spoke too soon.

here's where my cooking instincts got the best of me.

i like substitutions. and i make them relatively freely in my meals. however, if there's one thing i've learned about baking that i SHOULD have remembered here, it's that you shouldn't substitute the first time you make a recipe. the scones called for golden raisins. we don't have golden raisins in the house, but we do have a GIANT bag of frozen berries. i've seen and eaten some delicious berry scones. "why not berry instead of raisin? it can't possibly be that different."

i accounted for the wetness of berries v. the wetness of raisins and let the berries thaw out, squished out some of the juice, and added a little more flour.

what i didn't account for was this:

as i stirred the berries in, ever so gently, i watched my dough turn violet. and i laughed, a lot, at my foolishness and conceit to think i could simply substitute my own ingredients into a recipe that has been tried, tested, and perfected by a professional bread maker. silly, silly me.

but i pressed forward and scooped heaping mounds of awkwardly shaped dough onto a baking sheet. these certainly didn't look like the round, beautifully cut, clean edged scones the book pictures. heck, they weren't even white anymore. 

but i am a diva, and the show must go on. 

so into the oven the scones went. they took a little longer to cook than the recipe called for (i assume because they were a a bit more moist). while they were baking E looked into the oven and casually noted how they looked like giant purple cookies.

scones are supposed to rise and look like biscuits. 

my heart broke just a little, but i simply shook my head and braced for my first major bread failure since the commencement of my yeasty journey.

and then, magic:

the diva wins!!!!

if you're going to wing it, you better have feathers. a boa totally counts.