'That' Age

I'm getting to 'that' age.

You know - the time in life when you do occasionally stupid things but at least you can explain them away by mentioning how old you are.

My slightly stupid thing (and I say slightly because it really wasn't earth shattering - just exasperating) was done on Wednesday but it had its effects on Friday.

I had to make forty red velvet cupcakes for a fortieth birthday party. Not a difficult task but I was using a recipe that I hadn't done in a while and in the back of my mind I had an inkling that it needed some ingredients that I don't usually keep on hand. I found the recipe (after a ten minute search through many disorganised plastic sleeves of recipes from the internet) and wrote the ingredients on my shopping list.

Friday comes and the plan was to start baking at the crack of dawn. I started to get out the ingredients and I was only down to the third one when I realised that my fore-planning hadn't been terribly thorough. Oh yes, I'd bought the ingredients that I usually didn't stock but I'd forgotten to check in my pantry to make sure I had enough of the other stuff. And what I was short on was plain flour.

You ran out of baking ingredients??

The thing is that I generally bake cakes with self-raising flour. And I did have plenty of that but this recipe is so different I was pretty sure that I couldn't just substitute and hope for the best. I had enough flour for a double batch which, according to the recipe, would have made thirty-six cakes so I decided to be a little stingy when I came to spooning out the batter into the cases. And I did a pretty good job of it. Thirty-nine cupcakes! Being one cupcake short is just cruel but there was no way I could make them any smaller so I had to bite the bullet and make another batch.

I decided to quickly do a Google search to see if I could somehow use my self raising flour to make some more. My other option was to go to the shops but if I went to the shops I'd have had to have another coffee (because I'm genetically incapable of resisting that smell) and do the crossword in the paper and that would have taken a lot more time out of an already-tight schedule.

Of course there was an alternative recipe on the internet. Because the internet has answers to all the burning questions. It's just a pity that it didn't have the capability to read the situation and present me with the answer before I even knew that there was a problem. I could have saved myself a good half hour of wondering what was the best and most efficient way to solve my problem.

The whole point of this story isn't to show you pictures of pretty cupcakes - even though I'm doing just that.

I'm heading towards yet another birthday and I've realised that things will probably not get a lot better in this department. Where once I had a mind like a steel trap, it now resembles a pasta strainer. Exasperating at times. Like when you're trying to remember someone's name. Or exactly the right word that you know exists and it starts with a P. Or when you're punching your pin number into the ATM and you get it wrong for the third time and the machine swallows your card.

Thank goodness it doesn't require a lot of mental acuity to run.

By the way - I just had to go ask Luke's girlfriend how to spell acuity - because I'd forgotten - because I'm old! I love the irony.