Piece of Mind Cost Me $18

Baking can be great fun or great frustration in my kitchen. On a good day, I can zip through a few recipes no big deal, happy as a clam and full of dough and batter. On a bad day, I cuss like a freaking sailor. Yesterday was a cussing day.

It was in part rainy and snowy, making for an exhausting drag-yourself-around-the-house-like-a-zombie day; it was really hard to get out of bed even after a full night's sleep.

So I decided it was a soup day. And you need bread with soup. Need it. But the only thing I really had time to make was a quick bread. I've been meaning to try and replicate these scones I had at this little coffee shop in Charleston, and have been looking for a test recipe. They were sun-dried tomato and basil scones. And there was cheese in there, too, but I can't recall what kind.

The recipe I found called for dried basil rather than fresh (note to self: try fresh next time around) and grated Asiago cheese (I think either a milder cheese like mozzarella or a full-blown Cheddar would be better).

I mixed everything according to standard scone instructions (and another note: make sure you choose a bowl big enough to work your hands around in. I think I bruised up my knuckles using one that was too small. Mixing scones any other way than with your hands really doesn't work.) and rolled the dough into a round. I usually prefer to make drop scones, but the recipe was for a round so I followed instructions.

I preheated my oven and baked the things at the maximum time. When I pulled them out, I thought they looked a bit undercooked but told myself it was just the cheese melting. Nope. After they cooled and I pulled them apart, it was clear that the scones were half raw inside.

So I heated the oven and popped them back in.

Meanwhile, I had also made my first batch of cheese biscuits (crackers more than biscuits, really) and wasn't very happy with how they came out. They had the right consistency but pretty much fell apart when I tried to remove them from my very greased baking sheet.

At this point, you can imagine I was getting pretty annoyed. For a while now, I've been questioning whether our oven is heating to the correct temperature. Yesterday proved to be my breaking point. I decided that if it the oven was in fact running off temperature, it might be a big part of the frustration with these recipes. So, out of extreme exasperation, I finally broke down and found an oven thermometer at WilliamsSonoma.com, called the store to confirm they carried it, and drove over there to pick it up.

$19.52 later (that's with tax), I discovered that the oven I was using has indeed been heating to about 25 degrees lower than the setting. Good to know! I doubt our landlord will pay to have the ovens calibrated, but at least now I know how to set the freaking thing so that I can bake correctly.

Personally, I think it was money well spent. In reality, I guess I don't have to use the thing more than twice here, but it'll certainly come in handy if we move.

And the scones did finally bake and my subsequent cheese biscuit batches came out much better. So after all that I had a yummy snack and bread to go along with my soup (which thankfully proved not to be frustrating at all).

If you're interested, here's the thermometer I bought. Pretty inexpensive and it clips right to the oven rack.