The Early Riser

The Prima Donna has been working on a challenge from one of her teachers. The hardest part for her was going to bed at 10:30 and getting up at 6:30 (and that’s in the AM!) Like Scout, she has never been known as an early riser, but she really wanted to “rise” to the occasion this time. She started on Monday and it was pretty hard the first day. But by Tuesday, she was feeling good and she asked me if it would be OK if she made pancakes on Wednesday morning for the family. Of course I’m fine when anybody offers to cook around here, but I reminded her that I would be sawing logs at that time of day and unless she was burning the house down, she needed to let me sleep. It’s summer for crying out loud!

Not actual pancake photo credit

Wednesday morning arrived bright and early and she crawled out of bed with great intentions. When my sweetie got downstairs just before 7:00, she was staring at the pancake batter. “What’s wrong?” he immediately jumped to the obvious conclusion. “I don’t know…” she mumbled slowly. “The dough looks funny.” Now my sweetie is a fixer when it comes to recipes. Just the other day the Drama Queen was making rice pudding and she accidentally grabbed the container of cumin instead of cinnamon…well my first response was to just throw it away, but he actually made it not only edible, but delicious.

photo credit
 

So he immediately jumped in and tried to help. “It looks like your griddle isn’t hot enough,” he concluded as he scraped the black gobs of dough from the griddles. Then he proceeded to give a five-minute lecture on the merits of a hot griddle including the dancing water test. They poured out another bunch of cakes with similar results. “Hmmm…” he decided it wasn’t the griddle after all, it must be the batter. It looked a little thick. “How much of each thing did you put in?” he questioned as he stuck his little finger into the batter and then touched it to his tongue. He almost spit it out. The Prima Donna shrugged her shoulders and then started going over the recipe with her showing him each item.

When they got to the baking powder, she proudly held up the tablespoon. “Did you notice that this recipe calls for teaspoons of baking powder, not tablespoons?” my sweetie asked. The Prima Donna frowned. He started adjusting here and there, trying to get the recipe to work. After 20 minutes of adding flour, milk, anything he could think of, the batter still exploded on the griddle into tiny black balls of gooey mess. “How about we try again tomorrow?” he suggested. “I’m already late for work.” The Prima Donna agreed and set about cleaning up the mess and pouring the spoiled batter down the sink.

The next morning dawned bright and early at 6:30 and the Prima Donna climbed out of bed again. My sweetie joined her a few minutes later and they started mixing the batter. Now I know this is crazy, but remember, we have many mouths to feed so they had to six times the recipe. When they came to the baking powder, the Prima Donna proudly held up the teaspoon this time. “I’m not going to mess it up today,” she said brightly. She started to dig into the baking powder. When she got to six, she started digging for number seven. “What are you doing?” my sweetie asked. “You only need six.” Her face reddened and she started to laugh. “What’s the matter?” demanded my sweetie. “I think I did the math wrong yesterday,” she confessed. “Instead of six teaspoons of baking powder, I put in 24 tablespoons!” It’s no wonder my sweetie couldn’t fix it. And no amount of leavening is going to make the Prima Donna an early riser!