A recent post on our Garden Club refers to my “baked goods”. This seems to have surprised certain members of my family so I’m going to tell a little story:

There’s a scene I like in a otherwise fairly mediocre movie called “Quigley down under”. In case you’re not familiar with it it’s a western set in Australia starring Tom Selleck. He’s travelling around with a kind of fancy sniper’s rifle taking up lost causes. The villain is played by Alan Rickman (what a surprise). Rickman is a pistol aficionado and Quigley is a thorn in his side. He particularly seems to resent Quigley’s skill with the rifle and the fact that Quigley says he never cared for pistols. So in the final climactic scene he traps Selleck and forces him into a gunfight with pistols. They draw and Quigley pulls out his pistol and shoots the Rickman character. As he lies there dying the Rickman character says something along the lines of “But I thought….” and Quigley replies “I said I never cared for them. Never said I couldn’t use them”.

It’s the same with my baking. I never much cared for baking, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t know how to.

I decided to do more baking after we had our flood down in Briarcliff last year. In cleaning up we came across a stand mixer that, because Mrs. Dale didn’t have any space for it in the kitchen, had disappeared into our storage room downstairs. So I thought I’d give it a try. Since then I’ve made pizza, bread of various kinds (in fact I have some bread dough rising as we speak – see final product above); cookies; fruit pies; quiches; savory pies, banana bread (for which I received compliments from Germaine Chandelier who for many years was one of NY’s pre-eminent caterers) and, my piece de resistance: strawberry coconut cheescake.

So yes I can, indeed, bake