Of Mice and Men

First, an apology. I have been meaning to post this for a couple of weeks.

You know what they say about "the best laid schemes of mice and men".... They often go awry! I'm sure I could count more times when plans went wrong than I could times when they went right. In the big scheme of things, God directs things away from how we plan them, to the way that He has planned. He does so for the benefit of His children.

Once again, I recently experienced big plans being directed in a different direction than I'd imagined.

Just before that, however, I had a small almost-catastrophe.

I decided that I would make a batch of gluten-free apple cider doughnuts.

 I had just bought some more of a gluten-free flour blend that claims to be a perfect "cup-for-cup" substitute for all-purpose flour and, from my experience, this is true. Even though I have a doughnut pan, I wanted to use my new whoopie pie pan that is comprised of pumpkin-and-leaf-shaped compartments.

So, I put my doughnut mix into the whoopie pie pan and put it in the oven for a few minutes more than the doughnut recipe suggested. [My first clue that a catastrophe was awaiting should have been this: doughnuts ≠ whoopie pies] After baking and checking for doneness (more than once), I thought maybe I could turn the whoopie-pie-doughnuts out onto a baking sheet. This did not work well either, but got them as close to being done as I could get them without them burning. 

[Hindsight thoughts: should have used that doughnut pan after all...] "Well," I said to whichever dogs might have been listening, "they might look funny, but surely they taste as grand as they would have otherwise." [Okay, maybe that's not exactly how I said it.] 

Then, the tasting. Two bites into it, my face was that of a very disappointed baker. "These don't taste good and I'm going to have to throw them away!" I wailed in despair. "Let me try one," said my mother, the Unofficial Official Taste-Tester of Pumpkin Rose Farm (try fitting that on a nametag).

 Try the doughnuts, she did, and (to my surprise) she said they were very good. "Very good?" asked I, "How could you say that?" "They are good. They taste like ginger molasses cookies." GINGER MOLASSES COOKIES? These were APPLE CIDER DOUGHNUT...things... I took another bite and (again, to my surprise) they tasted good, very similar to ginger molasses cookies. [It's amazing what our minds can do.]

Now that we had identified the distinct taste of ginger and molasses, I had a mystery to solve: I hadn't put either of those ingredients in the mix, so why did we taste them?

Soon enough, Watson and I had deduced that the ginger had come from the cider that we'd previously added spices to, and the molasses came from the brown sugar. Later, there was even another positive opinion of these apple cider ginger molasses doughnut whoopie pie things. Again, I was very, very surprised. [No, I'm not a pessimist. And, hi, Person Who Liked the Doughnut Things..you know who you are.]

What was the lesson I got from all this? Don't bake doughnuts in a whoopie pie pan.

Also, "You can't always get what you want. But, if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need."