Flour Girls & Dough Boys

From Kamian Coppins

My mom is a baker, a cook, a genius.  Flour Girls & Dough Boys is her brainchild and it’s a big success– it has many fans, myself included.  However, despite our physical similarities (I can’t count how many times I’ve been mistaken for my mom, even in my early teens), I did NOT inherit her baking abilities.  That was apparent from a young age.  She has a recipe for shortbread chocolate chip cookies that was famous even before the bakery opened.  My first time ever making them, I mistakenly poured two teaspoons of salt into the mixer instead of one half teaspoon.  It was quite a joy trying to quadruple the recipe to make the cookies taste as delicious as they should. 

Kami Coppins

Ever since then I have had so many cooking and baking mishaps I couldn’t possibly count them all, which is the reason I was a bit wary when my mom asked me to join her pastry crew while one of her full-time employees was away.  However, since I could tell they needed the help and I needed the money, I consented.  There were many things that didn’t surprise me about the job– I disliked being there are eight a.m. every morning in the summer, absolutely everything was delicious, and it was best to try to avoid the freezer.  There was one thing that did surprise me, though: I wasn’t terrible at it!  I was whipping out cream puffs and cookies like a machine (but a machine that makes delectable, hand-crafted pastries) and I could even make ganache as well as my mom!  “Maybe my abilities as a baker are finally revealing themselves!” I thought… until the infamous day that I made molasses cookies.

The recipe for molasses cookies is a little different than almost any other recipe I had used to that point.  Instead of “4.6 kg flour, .03 kg vanilla, .9 kg butter,” the recipe has a fairly long list of spices with amounts such as “2 tbsp, 2 tbsp, 2 tsp.”  To most people, interpreting that would be easy.  Two tablespoons, two tablespoons, two teaspoons.  Duh.  Unfortunately for my baking-impaired mind, there is little-to-no difference between “tbsp” and “tsp.”  There I was, happily adding in spice after spice to my dry-ingredient mixture when a certain “tsp” caught my eye.  I glanced back and forth between the “tsp” on the recipe and the “tbsp” in my hand and panicked.  I didn’t know what to do.  I couldn’t tell anyone because surely they would make me throw the whole thing out and that would be an enormous waste of ingredients and time. 

Luckily, I pride myself on being a fairly intelligent person when it comes to almost anything besides baking, so I quickly found a solution.  I ran down the list of spices, determined which was supposed to be two tablespoons and which was supposed to be two teaspoons, matched the color of the spice in the bottle with the color of the spice in the mixture (thankfully I hadn’t actually mixed anything yet) and scooped out the majority of the extra spices.  I then completed adding the remaining ingredients, carefully checking five times over the amount stated in the recipe, mixed it with the butter and other wet ingredients, and prayed for the best.

I tasted the molasses cookies– do not worry, they tasted fine, as delicious as all the ones I had tasted before.  But I must say I was glad when the full-time baker returned and I did not have the stress of ruining the mouth-watering pastries that Flour Girls and Dough Boys regularly produces.  I love the bakery, and what I love even more is that other people do the baking.