Ballad of a nervous baker

Yesterday I was eating a spoonful of applesauce (one of my favorite snacks for whiny, low blood sugar moments: it's kind of like baby food for adults!), when an idea tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, Nervo," the Idea said, "you know what the only thing better than applesauce is?"

"What's that, Idea?" I asked.

"Applesauce baked into a bread-like treat!"

Well hot-diggity dog, the ol' gal was right. I set right off on a mission to bake an applesauce loaf…though that basically meant starting from the ground up, seeing as I didn't have any: baking soda, baking powder, sugar, eggs, cinnamon or a loaf pan. But I was determined, nothing was going to stop me! The two cornerstones of my diet, apples and bread—together at last!

I set out to follow the simplest recipe I could find (which of course I can't re-find now to link):

2 cups whole wheat flour 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce 1.5 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp baking soda 1 cup sugar 4 egg whites 3 mashed bananas 1 tbs vanilla extract 1/2 tsp cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 325°. In a blender, mash the bananas. Add to the sugar, mix well and let sit for 15 minutes. Add the applesauce and egg whites; mix well. Add remaining ingredients and mix till as smooth as possible. Pour into a greased 9" x 5" loaf pan. Bake 1 hour or until toothpick test says otherwise. Take 'er out of the oven, let stand 10 minutes and transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Now this was all kind of a leap of faith for me in the first place. I don't bake very often, and I haven't since I was vegan and the only pleasure I got out of life was eating things like egg-free cookies and bag upon bag of potato chips. Not only don't I bake often, but when I'm do I'm a super nervous baker—the type that peeks into the oven every five minutes to see if anything's burning, bubbling over or stinking to high heaven. Surely I could handle a recipe with fewer than 10 ingredients, though, right?

We started out with a bang. The bananas mashed to the perfect mush, the flour mixed in evenly and smoothly, and even my sorry excuse for a "medium mixing bowl," which is actually just an oversize salad bowl, was up to the task. With the loaf set and ready, I popped it in the ov and settled in for an hour's worth of hitting "refresh" on Facebook. Everything was going great.

Everything, that is, until I went to check its doneness. That's when disaster struck.

See, there are a couple things working against me here in the shoebox where the oven is: (1) I don't own a decent pair of oven mitts, and (2) the kitchen is actually so small that it can't accommodate both one nervous cook and one open appliance door at the same time. That means that in order to check on the loaf, I have to kind of shimmy backward, half out of the kitchen, hunched over the open door and reaching in for the pan with two dish towels loosely draped over my paws.

Well, I got it out okay, checked it with a toothpick and discovered it wasn't ready. That part was easy. But when I went to put it back into the oven, it slipped. No, it didn't just slip, it leaped. It leaped like Thelma and Louise in the front seat of a teal 1966 Thunderbird convertible, right over the side of a cliff. It slipped, rolled, and flipped clear out of the pan—upside down!—onto the rack in the oven.

I have never, ever cried about losing a single piece of food, but oh my friends, I cried when that loaf went down. I cried hard. I cried for the $30 in wasted ingredients (including a loaf pan I might now be too traumatized to ever use again). I cried for an hour's worth of wasted prepping, mixing and salivating over the delicious smells coming out of that treacherous oven. I cried because I am a natural crier; waterworks at the drop of a hat.

But then…

"Wait a second… I can still— I mean, I'll just finish baking it, right? Didn't Julia Child say it's totally okay to drop the hell out of something and just plop it back into the heat? (Apparently not, but whatever.) Well that's what I'm going to do, for Pete's sake, and ain't nobody here going to stop me."

And that's what happened. So what if it's misshapen and unevenly cooked? So what if I then spent 45 minutes scraping burned applesauce-batter sludge off the bottom of the oven? A slice of this stuff, a schmear of peanut butter and we are golden. To hell with your conventions of beauty in baked goods! We're lumpy and proud, damnit!

The Nervous Cook is no longer nervous about: the five-second rule.