remnants of joy and disaster...

my mom has an old cookbook with a bright red cover that is nearly as old as i am, and i once set out to make all the recipes in the bread section. this was back in my mid-to-late teens, when i discovered that kneading dough was a great meditation for letting go of stress. mom would wake in the middle of the night to find me seated cross-legged on the kitchen floor, waiting for my dough to proof. i learned one practical way of make sense of a senseless world somewhere between the Sally Lunn buns, French baguettes, and good-old-fashioned loaves of sandwich bread. fast-forward to the present, and frustration still leaves me with an overwhelming urge to bake for sanity's sake.

there has been some baking in recent days. i made an old favorite: scones with extra-sharp white cheddar cheese.

the dark spots around the sides are crispy bits of oven-toasted cheese. and, yes, it is as tasty as it sounds.

there was also an experimental batch of biscuits featuring more butter than should ever be allowed in any recipe. i figure that we are pretty much waiting for the apocalypse, so what difference does it make at this point?

this one involved repeated folding and rolling of the dough to create layers that stack like pages in a book.

i am convinced the death-by-butter dough would make for a fantastic pot pie crust, but that adventure will have to wait for some future disappointment in humanity. so, basically... any day now. i need to go hug a cat. be well, everyone.