Sunday, February 25, 2018

I heard there will be curling in the Olympics, so I told my sister who's a hairdresser. Boy did I get that one wrong.

So you know "Proofing" your yeast is making sure it actually is alive by adding it to some lukewarm water and a little sugar before adding it all to bread dough.
(watch I'll get that one a little off)

A pair of bakers were experiencing a supernatural crisis.

A magical, living snowman had laid a curse on their bakery and they could no longer produce anything.
No pastries, no cookies, no muffins, or cakes. Their proofing oven no longer allowed dough to rise.
Their refrigerator couldn't keep a chill.
Stovetops were cool to the touch.

Unsure of how to proceed, they called in a specialist in obscure curses to diagnose the issue.
They put some cookie dough on a sheet tray and set it in the oven, but it just would not cook!
The oven felt hot. The dough was made correctly.
It was as if the ability to bake had completely fled the confines of the oven.

"Well," the old curse expert started, "it seems the functionality of all your appliances are, in fact, still here in the bakery, they have just somehow been displaced to other areas."

"What do you mean?" a baker asked.
"For example, if we put a lump of bread dough back in the storage racks, it begins to rise as if it is proofing. This must mean that the functionality of your proofing oven still exists, it's just been relocated. It is all very strange."

"Is there anything we can do?"
"We will need to break the curse by cancelling it out with some magic of our own. Do you own anything that might be imbued with a hex or charm?"

One of the bakers chimed in that his grandmother had left a silicon baking mat that she purportedly charmed to magically prevent her cookies from burning.
It had been stored away in a dusty old box for years, but surely there was still an ounce of power that remained.

The baker went home to dig up the old mat while his coworker and the curse specialist mapped out where the different functionalities of the appliances had moved to.

The ability to bake, they determined, had been relocated to the bathroom.

It would make a suitable testing ground for their experiment to see if the two conflicting curses would break one another.
When the other baker returned, they lined a cookie sheet with the silicon mat and headed for the toilet.

Years later, the old curse expert was telling the story at a convention for the supernatural.

He got up on stage and recalled, "They crossed he; the snowman. He's a fairy tale they say. He's made of snow, but now the bakers know how he ruined their life one day. But there must have been some magic in that old Silpat they found. For when they placed it in the head, the dough began to brown."

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