Ever since she got here last month, we had been planning to make chocolate chip cookies together. Meaning she had been reminding me that I had promised at every opportunity, and I had been evading and dodging and ducking and weaving, hoping she would forget or give up. No such luck. So yesterday I set the butter out to thaw and set up the Kitchen Aid mixer. Of course, being six, she wanted to do the entire thing by herself. Because she is not a baby. Because she knows how. Because she won't make a mess.
So she measured and stirred and poured, even cracked eggs with minimum of broken shell and mess. Kinda sorta listened halfheartedly to my instructions and cautions. Because of excitement. Because she has watched the cooking channel. Because she is going to be in first grade next year, by golly, and has little else to learn about the world as an empowered 6-year-old.
You know where this is going.
Yep, when time came to add the dry ingredients-a bowl of flour and soda and salt-to the wet slurry in the mixer, I told her to lock the mixer stand down with the toggle on the right, hold her right hand firmly on the top, and turn the switch on the left to the first, lowest, gentlest setting.
I think she heard all this step-by-step coaching, but I'm not sure she heard it, because here's what happened: She tilted the contents in, lowered the beater without locking it, and immediately flipped the left switch selector all the way up to the highest setting. Yep, #10. A mushroom cloud of flour puffed from the bowl and ascended to the ceiling, coating her from her head to her knees in the process. Fallout settled in every crack of the stove, the toaster, the coffeemaker. Meanwhile, the mix arm, unlocked, kicked up at the strain of the ingredients in the bowl and slung them in a spew out of the sides of the bowl. Raw flour and half-mixed dough spurted in a five-foot radius of the bowl.
Half an hour of cleaning later, we did get cookies in the oven. Half an hour of wiping. Cleaning flour off of her and her step stool. Vacuuming. Sweeping. Mopping. Remeasuring and fixing. Cleaning the insides of the toaster, getting spurts of flour out of the gasket seal on the fridge-don't ask me how it made it that far, but it did.
I didn't have to say a lot to her about what she did. She was pretty upset, and pegged her error pretty quickly as not listening to instructions and paying attention and Doing As She Was Told. Lucky she came up with all that on her own, saved me the time.
You know, with all that, the cookies were pretty good. It's hard to mess up chocolate chip cookies.
I'm sure I have made horrible errors of my own due to not listening. To being in a hurry. To excitement. To thinking I know it all already.
I wish that more of my mistakes were as easy to fix as a bowl of chocolate chip cookies.
Part of one of my favorite prayers from the Book of Common Prayer goes:
We thank you also for those disappointments and failures
that lead us to acknowledge our dependence on you alone.
(So maybe a Kitchen Aid disaster in a kitchen is all part of a bigger purpose, too.)
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