When the oven's on, and the mixing bowls are out...

[mapsedge]

This is really just a continuation of a post I left with rowangolightly ...

If you want a steak, seasoned and grilled the way you want it, I'm your man.  But, if you want baked goods: bread; quickbreads; cookies; popovers; muffins; then you have to talk to my wife.  When M bakes the world rejoices.

Except when there's an event coming up, and she's baking a certain number of cookies for that event.  Then, the world may look at the gorgeous spread of cooling racks with their warm crumbly cargo, but should the world (read: me) have the temerity, NAY!  The effrontery to approach those racks, the spatula swings round like the rotor of an Apache attack helicopter, and the Mommy Voice proclaims, in a voice the neighbors can hear, "You can have THAT one," pointing to a collection of crumbs from a confection that couldn't take the strain of Baking Perfectionism and gave up, "but if you touch any of the others, I'll shall forcibly prove to you that this cookie sheet can be can be worn as a bathing suit, using you as the model."

I tried once, only once, to take a cookie from the middle, rearranging the other cookies the cover the gap.  She counts them, to the last chocolate chip, and Knows when one is missing.  No question of miscounting, either.  As successes and rejects pile up, she keeps a running total in the Cookie Ledger in her head.  Neither can one get away with swapping a Reject for a Success.  Cookies are, apparently, unique in the same way that DNA signatures are unique, and the Mental Cookie Ledger also compiles a Codis database of each cookie.

I love my wife.  I love when she bakes, or cooks anything else, for that matter.  Just had the urge to tell a story, of which some elements are exaggeration.