My nemesis - baking

It's sort of a standing joke in our house. I am a good cook, but give me a recipe that involves flour and baking powder and it always ends up with me in a destroyed kitchen and usually ends up with tears and take out.

My sister is a fantastic baker. She is patient and she measures things - apparently very handy skills to have if you want to make dessert. I am a bit-of-this-dash-of-that cook and I usually make at least 5 or 6 substitutions in a recipe. My very first attempt at baking a cake was a brick. (Horst, wherever you are, sorry for that stomach ache I gave you because you were too polite to spit it out. True story).

Anyway, we buy fresh, organic produce from our local CSA - Community Supported Agriculture - and this week we bought a case of fresh picked Georgia peaches. There are only so many peaches you can eat before the fruit flies decide to move in and they need to be used up PRONTO. So I decide that I need to make a peach cobbler. We are not dessert people, we very rarely eat it but Tim does like a peach cobbler.

Any recipe that starts with "4lbs of peaches, peeled, pitted and sliced" is deceptive. Horribly deceptive. It took me the better part of two hours to peel the slippery things despite blanching and shocking them. I should have given up at that point but the dry ingredients had already been mixed and the butter softening. Another note to self - don't soften the butter when you are making a crumble topping. It makes it sticky. As in it sticks to your fingers. A lot.

So now my kitchen is a mess, dinner hasn't been made, I have eaten gobs of buttery dough off my fingers that I'm pretty sure aren't in my calorie allowance for the day and I haven't got time to go for my evening jog. All I want to do is sit down and have an ice cold beer. And perhaps shed a little tear or two all over my chinese take out food.

Edit: it looks edible and it got a thumbs up from Tim. And the chinese food and beer was great!