Blueberry Bread, A Reflection of Life

Sometimes things just don’t go right in the kitchen. Last week, it was as if a bomb exploded in my oven. As smoke rose and the aroma of burnt blueberry bread swirled about the kitchen, I watched a disaster form in my new oven.

What do you do when you have an epoch food failure? Or really any kind of failure in life? Do you sit back rejected, throw everything away and crawl under the covers? That certainly is the easiest thing to do. Or do you make the best of the situation and trudge on? That was my kitchen dilemma last week and I was determined not to let this failure get me down.

As batter oozed and dripped down to the bottom of my still shiny oven causing actual flames, I summoned my two friends for help. My brain was as foggy as my smoke filled kitchen as I pondered what I could have done wrong. Did I accidentally put six times the amount of baking soda? Did I use far less flour in relation to the rising agent? Did the lemon powder from King Arthur have baking soda in it? I was stumped yet determined to save a most unflattering of situations. I decided to dump the six partially baked batters into a single baking dish and see what happened.

My friends, the life-savers that they were, helped dump and scrub and put out the flames. Though the bread baked into a moist and mushy cake and wasn’t a complete failure, I was still determined to try it all over again. What’s that famous saying? “If you don’t succeed, try try again?” It wasn’t enough for me to simply accept this third rate blueberry bumble. I needed desperately to start all over again and bake what I had been determined to create. So the oil, eggs, sugar and blueberries were soon scattered about my countertops only to start all over again. And this time, there was only success and the photo is proof in the pudding!

Gazing upon my finally finished and beautiful blueberry breads, with no concrete cause to my blueberry bomb, I simply chalked the disaster up to a mental mistake. (Some call this a brain fart!) I determined that sometimes in life you can’t be truly sure what goes wrong. But as long as you admit that you failed and try again, you may just get it right the second (or third) time. If only I could transfer this mentality to other parts of my life all the time.