Try Baking

You occasionally think about cooking for yourself, but when you do your thoughts typically drift to baking, specifically. Food is food, sure, but there's something about pulling... bread, for example, out of the oven, that feels especially... cooky. Fun, somehow. This isn't that hard and doesn't take that much preparation. So you decide to bake.

Googling easy baking recipes, you see the standard breads and cakes and such. You want something you can feel proud over, but not something you might... not completely succeed at. Eventually, you settle on pumpkin bread. It's that time of season, sure, but you specifically remember Home Economics class would have school smelling deliciously, and you were so surprised to learn the smell was pumpkin bread -- of all things, a gourd -- that it stuck with you forever.

It's actually impossible for you to already have pumpkin paste. But to your surprise, you don't even have any of the other, more common ingredients, either.

You drive over to the supermarket. It takes... surprisingly long to find everything. It should all be in the baking aisle! Why would you keep half of everything on the opposite side of the store, who is this FOR!

--Plunking everything down on the conveyor belt, as you get rung up you realize there is... absolutely no doubt what you are doing. If you EVER baked more often you would have at least some of this stuff before. But the young cashier doesn't seem to pay you any mind, so even the obvious seems to elude her. You forgot that this is HER job, and as such she's committed, for her own sake, to ignore processing anything unnecessary.

Once back home, (Pop-Tart actually has the balls to pretend you just came home from work again, and tries to get some food again before giving up, looking grumpy over it) you distribute everything on the kitchen table, and, with the recipe pulled up on your phone, you GET TO WORK.

Everything is a struggle. You can't scroll on your phone with dirty hands, you don't want to get egg on anything but get it on EVERYTHING, don't own NEARLY as many (any) spatulas as you thought, and VASTLY underestimated the difficulty of hand-mixing, nor do you know when you can stop.

One way or another... you get the unholy mass into the oven. You're kind of worried about the pan you're baking it in, it seemed a little, maybe-possibly rusty. But not enough to assume for sure, and after scrubbing it you feel like it'll be fine..

It needs an hour to bake, yet you manage to need all the time to clean up anyway, disinfecting every surface because of the ever-looming threat of SALMONELLA.

You are unable to resist occasionally peaking, however.

You grow quickly, rapidly more optimistic as a beautiful smell starts to fill your kitchen! No, your whole place! The bell finally goes off, and you pull it out! They suggest a toothpick test, but you don't have any so you just suffice for cutting it open! It looks... fine! ...You guess!

Putting a slice on a plate, you bite into it standing over your sink. Oh, it's good! Wow, you made this?? Wonderful! It's better than at the store! A little! You enjoy it, and look at the rest... you can refrigerate it, but you feel like it'll lose this magic when chilled. So you have **** but to gradually take slice after slice through the evening, until you've eaten the whole loaf, and crawl into bed groaning.