Oops.
Wednesday came and went . . . annnnnd no post. You know, sometimes we mess up.
Camp Bakewell is in full swing this week. Eighteen young bakers are in my school kitchen making bread, cookies, crostata, buns, scones, and pies. They’ve also found time for tea, writing their own play, and plenty of Frog and Toad stories.
But today, several of them experienced something that’s happened to me more times than I can count: baking fail.
I knew it was coming. I saw the cookie dough several of them sent to the oven, and knew it was not going to go well. It was gonna bleed all over the pan. Not enough flour? Too much butter? Too much sugar? Hard to tell. But the result for several teams was a pan of sad, soggy cookies.
As we gathered for the end of camp, we sang, we prayed, and I told them:
Guys, baking fails happen. Guess who’s dumped an entire pie into the bottom of the oven—and a couple homemade pizzas? Me. Guess who’s baked multiple loaves of bread only to realize they were missing salt only after I’d sliced them. Me. Guess who’s forgotten to add yeast, forgotten the sugar in pumpkin pie, forgotten to get six pies out of the oven and burned them to a crisp? Me.
Baking fails are an essential part of every baker’s life.
Failure happens. And this isn’t one of those posts about how we should champion our failures. You know, somehow make our messy, sloppy mistakes into a badge of honor. No, failure is frustrating and disappointing. Let it be that.
But tomorrow, we get up and we bake again. And again. And again.
It is God’s way to overpower spectacular failures by unspectacular discipleship. Jericho’s walls fall after a couple million mundane footsteps. One bake at a time, we grow from “one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor 3:18).
When we fail, we find forgiveness—a forgiveness that invites us back into the kitchen.
How to Bake Well
Camp Bakewell is brought to Washington, PA, by my bakebook How to Bake Well. I wrote the book to help kids in Washington learn to bake (and adults too). It’s filled with all the recipes that are most popular at The Hutch and the Ashby table.
Don’t have your copy yet? Get it on Amazon here!
