(Before we start, a confidential to Deek: Dearheart, the World Cup song is brilliant. Had I been clever enough to transfer my address book from my old computer to my new one, I would have sent you an email telling you so. I tried leaving you a comment on your site, but for some reason the Blogger verification graphics are not loading. But I did not want to let one more second pass without telling you: it's genius, and so are you. 
It was to be a day of baking, more baking, compote preparation and the sharing of waffle and chocolate chip cookie recipes. It became a day eaten up by the bizarre, intermittent failure of our cable modem (it seems to be behaving now, but for about an hour we were subjected to string of "incompatible IP address" error messages that left us feeling about as patient and even-tempered as you can imagine), as well as by a cake that I should have been able to make under general anesthesia, suddenly collapsing into a wet underbaked pudding. It was a classic example of overriding my own instincts: when I pulled it out of the oven, I could hear the cake crackling, and I knew that a cake should never come out of the oven until the crackling almost stops, but the top felt firm and was a nice golden brown, and after all, hadn't I left it in the oven on the long side of the specified baking time? It's still a delicious cake, full of protein thanks to eggs, buttermilk and soy powder and full of vitamins and fiber thanks to rhubarb, and yet it still leaves me despondent, not because it's a failed cake, but because it would have been so easy for me to avoid this failure, if only I had trusted those instincts of mine.
The good news is that even as I am powerless to fix the remote, even as I am careless with a basic butter cake, even as I am all thumbs with lacework and even as I am feeling generally scattershot and graceless, I can still bake a decent loaf of bread. This little beauty is the sweet saffron bread with currants from Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf, one of the most beautiful books on bread I have ever had the pleasure to read. Rolling the fermented dough into the baguette shape that would eventually become the "S" coil, feeling the dough stretch out underneath a taut yet pliant surface, feeling the surface of the countertop with my fingertips and the heels of my hands, and painting the risen loaf with the egg yolk/water wash that is the source of that gorgeous deep brown crust: it all reminded me -- and yes, I do need reminding -- that once upon a time, this was my life, and I was better at it than I ever knew.
