The Flour Story: Success!

If you haven't read The Flour Story, you might want to go back and do so. This is the last post in "The Flour Story" series. I though I posted it last Thursday, but apparently it's been stuck as a draft instead! Oops! So, hopefully you will enjoy it today...

I've been baking cookies since I was about eleven or twelve years old - maybe even longer. Chocolate chip cookies are one of my specialties. They are my fall-back recipe, the one thing I make when I need to make something but don't have the mental wherewithal or the energy to do anything else. I'm good at making cookies. I always have been!

When my chocolate chips cookies failed not once but twice, I felt defeated! What could I possibly have done wrong? Why could I no longer make cookies?

Then came the biscuits. Simple, easy biscuits. Instead of holding their shape and staying light and fluffy, they spread out like pancakes. Okay, they weren't quite as flat as pancakes - and they weren't inedible like the cookies - but they still didn't turn out right.

How could I possibly have become so inept at baking? I love to bake! I've always baked! I'm better at baking than any other type of cooking! What was wrong with me?!

The truth is, I didn't do anything wrong other than to use bad flour. It wasn't my technique. It wasn't my implementation. It was my ingredients.

Sometimes we do everything right and things still go wrong. That's just the way life is. All too often, when that happens, we consider ourselves a failure and determine that we will just not be able to succeed in that area. We do it at home, at church, at work, and in every aspect of our lives. We assume that we are incapable when really all we need is the right ingredients.

A few days after the biscuit incident, we went grocery shopping and bought a bag of good flour. I then proceeded to mix up a batch of chocolate chip cookie bars. Spreading the dough in the pan, I realized it looked right. I snatched up a bit (yes, I eat cookie dough - can't help it!) and realized it tasted right! One ingredient change, and it was all right!

A few days later I made up another batch of biscuits, this time cutting them and freezing them for later. We pulled a bag of frozen biscuits out of the freezer this week for breakfast, and they were right! One ingredient change...

Of course, then I had to make some brownies this week. And, wow, were they perfectly good!

When we fail in life, we have to stop assuming that we just can't do it. We have to look at all of the factors involved. True, there will be things that we're not capable of doing. But more often than not there's an "ingredient" that just isn't right. We have to be willing to try again. And when we finally do succeed, the success will be as sweet as a perfectly made chocolate chip cookie bar!