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Why do the easy things we set out to do often turn into a disaster?
I asked myself last weekend whether there was some kind of master skill for making caramel apples that I have not sufficiently gleaned after decades of motherhood.
The problem with creative projects as I grow older is that I forget how painstaking even the simplest things can be. I'll experience the brutality of, say, decorating cookies with royal icing, and five years later I'm back at it again, totally anesthetized to my previous attempts. A quarter of the way through, I suddenly remember my prior battles and end up furious that something like a layer of caramel refuses to stick to an apple all over again.
And I mean--just flat out refuses.
I've been seeing these pretty little treat boxes on Instagram, and I thought I'd make a few for some of the littles in our family for Halloween. My plan for the boxes was to begin with mini caramel apples, which I'd wrap in cellophane and tie with ribbon.
According to the package directions, you heat caramel in the microwave, dip the apples, and put them on a lined baking tray. No big deal! Except when you set them down, stick side up, all the caramel slides off the apple in obeyance to gravity. Soon it looks as though you never made caramel apples at all.
"We don't happen to have a stand somewhere that would hold caramel apples upright, do we?" I asked my husband.
He's not the sort of man who is going to tear himself away from a puzzle to build me something--say, a box with holes in it. So I did the only thing that was immediately available to me. I stuck the apples in the top of a loaf of sourdough bread he'd made a few days earlier.
Now, let me explain about this sourdough bread, lest you think I'm an inconsiderate wife.
He's been making sourdough for a year, ever since a friend gave him a starter that has been passed down through generations of her family--all the way back to the days of the Oregon Trail. So instead of improving his golf game or collecting stamps, my husband has taken up sourdough as a hobby, and every loaf that comes out of the oven, he believes, should make the front page of a newspaper.
"Look at the ear on this one!" he'll yell from the kitchen. He spends Saturday mornings now mumbling about baking temperatures, dough hydration and proofing. We used to make bacon and coffee and read the newspaper.
I gave up trying to learn his new lingo. All I know is that our kitchen has become a bread-making factory and my cupboards, on any given day, have a thin film of dried dough all over them. I often have to schedule the making of dinner--or a birthday cake--in my own kitchen. I have lost the only territory in my life that felt completely mine.
In case you're wondering what he does with all this bread, he walks around the neighborhood giving loaves to the neighbors. He's like Mr. Rogers, but in a white baker's hat.
His mother had baked everyday of his childhood-- and she was a German baker at that--very precise, very exacting with her doughs and crusts. And so my husband, too, is very methodical, and absolutely convinced that there is a correct way to do everything. Flour is weighed to the gram. Improvisation is seen as a suspicious activity. And he has a special tool for every conceivable task, preferably manufactured in Germany.
Half the reason I'd chosen that particular loaf to hold my candy apples was that no one had eaten even a slice of it since it came out of the oven several days earlier, when it hadn't lived up to his expectations.
Eventually he walked into the kitchen and saw the apples sticking out of his bread loaf looking like little flowers growing in a garden bed.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I had a caramel-apple emergency."
"Well, it was a good idea," he said.
I know you're going to write and say, "Make sure all the wax is off the apple and refrigerate them quickly." I did that. They're still horrible.
Luckily we have another creative in the family, one that doesn't mind if we use his creations for other arcane tasks. Unfortunately, he only makes bread.
His candy apples looked worse than mine.