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New Oven

New Oven

I am bursting with anticipation. There is a new addition to the family - not the two-legged or even the four-legged kind. It does not bark, poop, talk back or scratch. It is a state-of-the-art convection oven with turbo-quartz radiation
( haven't figured out what that is all about yet ) and several knobs with different functions. I drool and fantasize while poring over pages after pages of professionally tweaked pictures of bakes,pizzas, pot-roasts and desserts. Oh, the possibilities and promises! 

Over the past few months, we have been eating out a lot - out of conveniece, chilling with good friends, trying out new joints, tired of eating the same ole boring stuff...any excuse will work, really. It turns out to  be a bummer when you pay good money for poor food, sometimes accompanied by even poorer service. Every now and then, the thought creeps up - " I could do better than that, and get more bang for the buck." In the end, pride prevailed, and the tipping point came when I was introduced to this oven at TOTT that could deliver crispy thin crust pizza on a pizza stone, baked to perfection, burnt to the right note. Yum! After a swipe of the credit card and the ding of the cash till, there was one happy staff beaming from ear to ear from the sale of a relatively big ticket item that's coming home with me.

Baking a cake is somewhat of an enigma. You take several ingredients, weigh and mix them with precision, turn on the heat, and voila, the end product! Depending on the skill of the chef and quality of the ingredients, you await the results.Sometimes it sinks when it's supposed to rise, and vice versa. 

I am thinking of an analogy - which may be venturing into dangerous territory based on events that have transpired not too long ago, but now the dust has settled.  Life is like a piece of cake - Aargh, beginning to sound a little flat already!
But I will persist. You can determine what cake you'd like, and choose the ingredients carefully. Sometimes, you cannot control the temperature, but you can turn on the in-built thermostat and stay cool. Many cakes do not utilise the thermostat function and end up getting burnt - not pretty nor digestible. Usually, some form of heat control is required for the ingredients to set and the cake to form, even the non-bake cheese-cake variety ( which I consider a little flaky) needs to be put into the fridge. Once again, the end product may turn out to be good, bad, mediocre,, noble, selfless, selfish, over the top...there are many varieties of cake, with or without yeast. An instruction manual is essential, to get the proper mix and method. Make sure you get the right one! 

In the meantime, I am ready to get acquainted with my new oven and looking forward to a long and beautiful relationship.

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