The Bread Diaries

Image by Scott Umstattd

How to Make a Muffin Top into a Bread Basket

Recently, many of us have had way more time nestled home than we would have had if we were on a budget friendly summer family STAY-CAY. What comes with staying at home and being deprived of trips to Disneyland or the beach, are lots of free hours to catch up on watching our Netflix library saves and time to contemplate our grand purpose in life.

At some point during these contemplative hours an unknown driving force takes over.

Apparently, this powerful force compels us to nurture our previously neglected families by cooking culinary delights and by baking almost everything ever seen on a Giada cooking show.

Even though cooking with Giada shows are in heavy cable rotation, I personally prefer the older Nigella Bites series for inspiration because Nigella Lawson is just lovely. She has a great English accent and looks very womanly. She actually eats her creations, a trait I greatly appreciate in my baking and culinary role models, not like some “breasts always out front” lollipop head.

After all isn’t the credibility of a chef directly proportional to their body fat percentage?

However, we do not need cooking shows to inspire us, do we my kitchen queens?

Inspiration is extremely easy to find. Even our William Sonoma catalogue beckon us with pretty “don’t you want to bake me” pics. Photographically perfect FB posts openly challenge us to get our game on in this new virtual world bake off.

Honestly, I simply pass a Ghirardelli’s triple chocolate brownie mix package and I’m ready to bake.

For the past 3 months, I have been exposed to a continuous array of visually glorious carb laden treats that mesmerize me and call me.

I know that I have not been alone in this either because all the non-wholesale flour is gone. Truly missing. The grocery store shelves are bare. In every store, on every shelf, where the flour used to be is nakedness or rather nothingness. Now, there is just a sad quiet space where one lonely gluten free bag sits, sometimes accompanied by his friend, almond flour.

Obviously, when we who bake are desperate (not those gluten sensitive), we will begrudgingly accept this option, won’t we?

When pastry flour is nowhere to be found, almond flour brownies will do.

Yes, they will. When the chocolate calls, we must do what we must do!

Many of our bakers have gotten quite creative with current various shortages and product limits. Bakers have been improvising and making all manner of sweet and savory breads: zucchini brownies, oatmeal banana chip cookies, chocolate mayonnaise cake, yam muffins, and butternut squash pie.

Who knew?

And exactly what is up with all the baking of actual bread?

Did we run out of bread too?

I don’t buy bread that often, but did I miss something?

My thought is, if I can buy a rustic loaf from La Brea Bakery, then why would I put myself through the day long process of kneading, rising and then kneading again? It must be some sort of a millennial challenge, like those posts where people pose and try to mimic a famous painting using odd stuff around the house. Some are very clever but some just look like a meme made from vintage Color Forms pieces.

I know this seems obvious that making a mountain of baked goodies leads to eating a mountain of baked goodies. Lots of supporting evidence clearly states that eating an abundance of yummy goodies, eventually transforms into a substantive caloric increase. An increase, which if more than our body can burn off, eventually turns into stored fat cells. Fat cells who love to stick with their fat cell buddies. I find it interesting that we love our fat so much that we have endearing terms for it, such as back fat, batwings, thunder thighs and muffin top. However, our fat cells also have levels of measurement or defined degrees of storage, if you will.

My guide to our favorite levels of fat.

MUFFIN TOP

For this level, I don’t mean the crystalized sugar muffin top on your newly baked blueberry lavender muffin. NO and NO. Although that sounds tempting and I want some.

Instead I am defining the “muffin top” that sits right above your pants waistband, that slight overhang of happy flesh when we can pinch more than an inch. The old Special K Test.

You know. You have a mirror…. and pants.

However, if you already had a full sized adult muffin top before the bake-off challenge, you may have just leveled up.

CAKE TOP

Cake Top is a slightly softer gummier situation with even more overhang than Muffin Top. It is something you can no longer deny. It is when your fav jeans finally cry out in stretched agony praying that you will order up their sibling, just one size larger. This is when you get out your skinny clothes box from under the bed and lovingly place your once perfect denim buddies in their resting place while promising them you will come back and rescue them, after you go Keto for 6 months.

I know this pain, my lovelies. I have already been there, about one month ago.

Not the Keto! Just ordering up the larger sister pants.

If you are also one of those people (like me), who has discovered that even frozen brownies and chocolate birthday cake are a pleasant late-night snack, then you have the hidden (but not for long) potential to reach one more level up.

BREAD BASKET

To fully experience Bread Basket level, you must visualize, so close your eyes.

See a handle-less rustic mid-sized oval woven basket. You know the ones. They serve a family of six or more. They look like they were made out of tiny willow branches of slightly different sizes and variegated colors. Maybe they were made by woodland elves or forest fairies. They cost about $90.

Look closer at the basket.

Notice that the basket is overfilled, way above the rim. It is bursting with a variety of warm, just out of the oven, browned, glossy and glazed with butter, fist sized breads. The breads are all nestled together like little kittens, peeking out of the unbleached linen napkin they are wrapped in, each similar but not exactly the same.

Now picture that entire bread basket, napkin and all……

Stuffed into your pants.

More precisely stuffed into the front of your pants primarily at the waistband. Maybe some squishes around the sides and into the back area a bit, above and below your waistline, creating a substantial but pliable overhang. You can grab it with two hands and still have some left over. It gives you a nice full Buddha belly when leisurely plopped on the couch.

That is Bread Basket level, in all its puffy gummy doughy glory.

So, there you have it. Simple, to the point and easy enough to accomplish.

How to make a Muffin Top into a Bread Basket.

Just bake and eat all the things that call you, without restraint.

See the cake, make the cake, eat the cake. Repeat. Repeat again.

Now that I have clearly defined this attainable journey, I believe that many of us will be leveling up to full Bread Basket if this helpful vacay goes on much longer. The gyms may have just opened but they are filled with germ terror. I personally can’t dance, run stairs and walk enough to burn off this amount of caloric increase.

So, I am calling for a truce in these covid-19 baking wars.

Ladies, Gentlemen and all others, please join me.

Let us just say NO to “How to Make a Muffin Top into a Bread Basket”.

Now, if you are in your full bloom and confident in your baking aftermath, then I am proud of you for knowing who you are and owning it with pride. Absolute kudos to you! Sincerely.

No judgment, ever.

There is a world for all of us: short or tall, small, medium, large or X large as well as light, dark and darkest.

Me though, I am vain, and hopefully not too shallow.

Perhaps I have body dysmorphic disorder or a fatty fat mirror. Not Sure.

For certain, I don’t have the budget to keep buying bigger and bigger sister pants.

Either way, I have reached my uncomfortable place.

The place where my minimalist wardrobe says enough is enough. Keep this up, Missy and your Spanx gym legging will definitely have camel toe. A very full & very loose tunic dress, probably a maxi, will be your Summer finest.

So, DO NOT bake me any homemade sourdough bread (which I love), cookies or brownies as a gift.

I have no will power. I will succumb. I am weak.

I am the kind of person (as is my sister) that agrees that a glob of homemade peanut butter frosting on a healthy, low sugar, low carb chocolate sweet potato muffin, will make it even better.

For me, I see an extreme lean-out program in my future and a lot less baking, if any at all.

I must say “Hell to the No” of the Bread Basket and the baskets of bread.

And probably the bottles of whiskey and wine that go so nicely with.

(Big Sigh)

FYI, For those of you waiting, I will also be putting off that big swim suit reveal, until further notice.

Until next time, my pretties.

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Image by Scott Umstattd

all photos curtesy of Unsplash