high-bar baking

I’m basically the Hulk.

Is a much more fun thought to think when you’re rampantly destructive than, “This spatula is rather weak, huh?” 

Even if the latter is the truth. Spatulas shouldn’t even come with wooden handles, let alone bamboo ones. If you can’t take the heat, why are you in the kitchen again? Metaphorical heat, of course. Wood is the best for taking heat and not transferring it back to my hand (thank you, insulators), which is why the wooden spoon is such a preferred cooking instrument. But when it comes to the amount of force I use to stir thick batters, cute little decorative patterned spatulas with pithy sayings are not fit for purpose. 

If you hadn’t figured it out already, I broke a gift spatula making Miss Kelli’s Cookies. I always make a double batch (to use an entire block of cream cheese instead of wasting half), so the bowl of my stand mixer is very full. I’m trying to get to the bottom to scrape up the loose weirdness down there, because otherwise some cookies always end up… hinky. To no avail, of course. I never seem to succeed at eliminating all the “how did that cookie end up a puddle of butter?”s in the batch. But I was making an attempt, on a batter so thick I could roll it into cylinders were I so inclined. And the handle cracked. Then cracked again. 

So I treated myself, on my birthday, to a trip to my favourite local baking store to buy a replacement. A tough replacement. A real man’s man spatula. Sentences I’m sure you hear all the time. 

Now I have one with a metal base, even if my hand’s still getting use to its shape. And I got it at a discount for basically no reason! Chocking that one up to birthday magic. Because if you’re not going to believe in birthday magic, what are we doing here? 

Tim Ferriss once cited a friend of his, I believe, who said something along the lines of, “If you find yourself saying, Cool, the good knife is clean, you should re-evaluate your life. Because if you have a good knife, it means you have a bad knife. Maybe get rid of the thing you don’t even want to have in the first place. What’s it adding?” 

Food for thought. I know I felt that way when I Marie Kondo-ed my closet. 

May your spatulas be sturdier than your Hulk tendencies.