I can’t bake.  I don’t know why.

I have demonstrated over the last six months or so that I can follow a recipe.  I’m not good yet at going “off-book,” for lack of a better phrase– I’m not able to look at my pantry and come up with a meal as opposed to deciding “I want this,” finding a recipe for it, and then going out and buying everything I might need to make that recipe.  But there haven’t been that many categories of food so far that I don’t seem to be able to handle *except* for baking.  Any dish involving anything called “batter” is going to go wrong in my hands.  It’s annoying and I hate it.

This one shoulda been simple.  Peel and chop up some apples, toss them with sugar and cinnamon, melt butter in my two 5 1/2″ skillets (the idea is that there’s one apple pancake per skillet, right?) then sauté the apples in the butter.  Meanwhile, mix up the batter, which is your basic butter/flour/egg/milk/salt mixture, pour it over the sautéed apples, then bake the whole mess for ten minutes in the oven.

The recipe was seriously like five sentences long.  This shoulda been simple.

Issues were as follows:

• Waaaay too much butter for what I was trying to do. This I blame on the recipe.  It said to melt the butter then use “half” of the melted butter for the batter; no.  There were pools of melted butter rising to the top of the batter when I poured it into the skillets.  This may possibly be related to issue #2, but I don’t think issue #2 would have been as much of a problem if I’d just had less butter to begin with.
• I don’t think I sautéed the apples for quite long enough.  There was too much apple for the skillets (leaving me with several pieces of cut, peeled, sugar-and-cinnamoned raw apple, which isn’t exactly a problem) but even with a bunch of them held back there was too much apple in the skillets and I didn’t cook them down long enough.  This one’s my fault; I was trying to get everything done before Bek left for work so I figured I’d be able to cut short the apple-cooking part.  It ain’t like raw apples taste bad; they’re just crunchier than properly cooked ones would have been.
• Forgot the salt. Dumbass rookie move; on the other hand, it was just supposed to be a pinch of salt per skillet’s worth of batter so I can’t imagine it made a huge difference other than to the taste.
• After that, though?  The oven turned into a smoky hell, because the skillets flat weren’t big enough to hold the batter.  “You should have used bigger skillets,” you say?  Pfah.  The recipe and the cookware are both from the same brand, and the cookbook I used is by the same company that makes the skillets.  The recipe was literally tuned specifically for this skillet.  The one you’re looking at turned into some sort of Fourth of July magic snake-lookin’ bullshit and the other one just flat didn’t cook at all; the butter boiled over the edges and burned in the oven, which meant that when I opened it the fires of hell poured out and I had three fire alarms going in my house at 6:45 in the morning with a sleeping baby not too far away.  WHICH IS ALL SORTS OF AWESOME AND FUN LET ME TELL YOU.

The one I pulled the apples out of and then threw away, deeming it unsalvageable.  The pictured “pancake” was at least edible but tasted awful, possibly due to lack of salt but possibly also just due to the recipe generally being crap.  I may try this once more and make two of them in a much bigger skillet, which ought to minimize spillage and also give me a bit more room to sauté the apples properly before pouring the batter in.  This ought to be something that tastes good, dammit; it’s bloody apple pancakes and apple pancakes are supposed to be fuckin’ tasty.

Bah.  Food is stupid.