Bake it off

There’s always that one person.  You know–the one who insists  on doing it the long way.  You know them, because they’re the one who would rather spend twenty minutes trolling around the grocery store looking for something rather than ask someone who works there where to find pizza sauce.  Or the one who spends twenty-five minutes doing math longhand because it’s “just too much trouble” to get out a calculator.  The person who still has a Rand McNally Road Atlas.  Like I said.  You know the one.  And I’m here to tell you…

…I’m that one person.

I’m sure there’s some really smart, psychological reason probably linked to when I learned to walk or the fact that I refused to eat peas until I was 20, but I prefer to think it’s because I’m a rebel.  I have to go my own way–march to the beat of my own drummer.  Put the wind in my sails and sail off toward the horizon.  It’s all very romantic and much more dramatic than, say, potty-training.

So, tonight my old, Watch-Me-Be-Difficult self did it again.  I decided to bake this peanut butter, chocolate chip bread I found on Pinterest to take into work tomorrow.  I got the stuff, pulled up the recipe tonight and it told me to use…an electric mixer.  Now, I do (somewhat begrudgingly) own this pretty hip, 1949 handheld mixer that weighs about a ton, but I will be honest with you.  The prospect of cleaning the darn beaters means I avoid using it for anything short of meringue.

So when this recipe suggested I use a mixer for a quick bread, I instantly decided that a spoon would be fine.  I have this one wooden spoon I got at a garage sale when I was fresh out college.  It’s a great spoon–it looks like it’s about a million years old, it has a nice long handle–and it is my official “baking spoon.”  So I got out the Baking Spoon, laughed in the face of this recipe, and stubbornly insisted on blending peanut butter, brown sugar, and two eggs by hand.

Well, I can tell you it worked just fine.  It took maybe three extra minutes, but I don’t care.  My friend, Kelly, has this spoof on the Taylor Swift song “Shake If Off” hanging in her kitchen, that popped into my head as I was mixing this batter.  I’ll be diplomatic and say that T. Swift is not exactly in my top ten favorite artists of all time…or any time…but tonight, after successfully defeating a “mixer only” recipe, I found myself literally dancing around my kitchen singing,

“Players gonna play, play, play, play, play…And haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate…but I just bake it off, bake it off!”