Yesterday was Christmas baking day, but I didn’t factor in time for the dough to do its thing and for the oven to preheat and bake and bake some more, and for me to then take care of the trillion dishes that baking produced.  My kitchen looks like a disaster area or an example of a hundred and one health violations.  Don’t worry, it was sanitary before the baking happened.

The original intention was to make two batches (doubling the recipe doesn’t really work out in this case), so there are some extra ingredients and things scattered around the kitchen with all of the other mess.  Only one batch made it to completion, which brings up the next issue.

I have 3.75 loaves of stollen to show for my labor.  I assumed I would have 7.75 loaves at this point (that last quarter loaf is for necessary quality-sampling purposes and because you can’t take bread out of the oven without eating some).  Do I go for another round of baking?  Do I sacrifice several good hours of sleep tomorrow for the sake of tasty food?  I’m reasonably certain the answer to that question is going to be “no” this year.  Sorry, friends.  Several of you were slated to receive stollen in the next few days, but it looks like I’m going to have to be selfish with my meager baked output.

With all of that beautiful baked bread/dessert at home, I still managed to buy Little Debbie Pecan Spinwheels today at the grocery store.  I consumed two of them within twenty minutes of the purchase.  Spinwheels have been a long-term favorite.  They’re totally sweet and desserty, but they’re just on the okay side of the junk food spectrum.  They’re kind of a natural color, after all.  You could pretend they’re not bad for you, unlike most of their Little Debbie cousins.  (Swiss Cake Rolls?  Not even remotely close to being healthy.)

Enough of a reverie about food for one day, right?  I promise I have other interests.  Sometimes I think about friends and books and other things between thoughts about food.

Speaking of other things, I recently watched Saving Private Ryan for the first time.  It was a fantastic movie–sad and powerful and all of that.  I did have to watch it in small doses though, and it was the TV edited version.  I have a hard time watching war movies with semi-contemporary weapons now that my brother is in the army.  The end of the movie threw me off, too.  If it was trying to make me feel better about all of the sadness of the first 95% of the movie, it totally failed.  If it was trying to portray the brokenness of the world, it achieved that goal.  I’ll be on a strict regimen of comedies for the next week to recover from all of that.