In The Powder Room

I baked some chocolate brownies today, momentarily forgetting that my oven isn't in the healthiest of states. (It blew a gasket or some similarly-crucial element a few weeks ago. Despite a man with a very big toolbox coming over to look at it, and him subsequently telling me very authoritatively that he had fixed it, it still doesn't appear to work properly. Or really at all, in fact.)

So my beloved brownies were burnt instead of crispy on the outside, and utterly raw instead of deliciously gooey on the inside, and as I scraped them from the baking tray straight into the bin I threw a proper tantrum and flounced out of the house. I needed time alone to mourn the loss of the home-baked soul food which I had been dreaming of all afternoon.

Mercifully, my place of solace at such times is the beach, and it soon worked its magic. As my walking pace and heart-rate slowed to match the soothing rhythm of the crashing waves, I let the brownie disaster go. And I resolved there and then not to get my knickers in a twist over such unimportant matters from now on.

I'm usually pretty lucky in the kitchen and haven't had to work my way out of too many domestic disasters, but during today's kitchen drama it occurred to me that such moments so often throw us over the edge for reasons that are totally unrelated to the event.

What do I mean? To the casual observer, it may have appeared that I irrationally lost my will over a batch of inedible brownies, but what was really going on in my mind as my heart sank along with with the contents of my baking tray was something much more subtle.

Home-made brownies served with ice cream by the fire on a chilly February Sunday afternoon; the very idea holds so much promise. Yet the waste of good chocolate and time lost on something fruitless? Well that's palpable disappointment.

As I pouted about my failed brownies I was really letting off steam about all of life's little ways of letting you down.

So there's only way to fix this. I need a do-over - a triumphant, successful batch of brownies to even the score and prove that life isn't all dashed expectation and disappointment.

Except my oven's still broken. So if you've been moved at all by my plight please feel free to send home-baked goods in my direction. It'll be an act of mercy.