Retail Therapy

When most women engage in a little bit of retail therapy, they buy shoes, or purses, or some other form of fashionable attire. Me, I buy baking pans.

Being annoyed the other day that I had to stop at the pharmacy and buy fiber tablets, I decided to cheer myself up by buying this. Isn’t it adorable? And Valentine’s Day is only 340 days away, so it should come in handy very, very soon. But I don’t care, I bought it anyway. My mom will probably get heart-shaped mini-cakes for her birthday next week.

My collection also includes this, this and this, the latter of which I used to try to make a romantic cake for R for Valentine’s Day 2005 using strawberry and red velvet cake.

A word to the wise: use white and strawberry instead if you ever get the inclination to make something similar. For some reason, red velvet cake tends to contract more than other cakes during the baking process, so the red velvet rings separated from the strawberry rings and it turned out to be a bit of, well, a disaster that had to be held together by enough toothpicks to build a miniature log cabin. But at least it was still a sweet-tasting disaster.

I won’t even get into the list of cheesecake pans, mini-loaf pans, bundt pans, angel food cake pans and traditional round and rectangular pans that fill our kitchen cabinets. Perhaps I missed my calling as a pastry chef.

Oh, and for you shoe fans out there who want to have your cake too, check this out.

Okay, enough of the food stuff for now. I have a cake (or two or three) to go bake…