Mini Sugar-Topped Monkey Breads (Plus Book Giveaway)

130 CommentsMonday • May 17, 2010 • by Ari

Hello friends! It’s been a while hasn’t it? I’m sorry. I had to figure some things out…

Let me explain.

I always thought I kept “blog life” and “real life” pretty separate. That this site was just about food. Then I had a baby – and no one in my family called or wrote or visited. Even my brother who lives across the street. At first I was surprised. Then angry. Then sad. Then all three all over again. My parents called to yell at me. I tried to explain why I was hurt. They told me I was wrong…. And before I knew it, I’d lost my blogging mojo. I didn’t even want to bake anymore.

Turns out, I put more heart and soul into this site than I realized. And when my entire worldview changed in the span of a few months, I didn’t know how to write about food anymore. I couldn’t draw upon the family memories that have so often appeared in posts because I didn’t have a family . Heck, the whole reason I began this blog was to keep in touch with them so… so where did that leave me and this site? It was a puzzle I didn’t have the answer to, so I immersed myself in life as a mom and soaked up as many beautiful baby moments as I could.

Soaking in the sights at the local park. Oh look! There are leaves up there!

Since my last post a lot has happened. My little guy has started to laugh. He thinks our dog Oreo and his Mortimer the Moose are hysterical. He grabs everything and turns the page when we read One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish to him. I celebrated my first Mother’s Day, which was awesome thanks to my thoughtful husband and friends who sent warm wishes my way. We made a mile-high devils food cake with brown sugar frosting. The recipe came from Sky High and it was amazing.

Last Thursday I came home late from work and when the baby saw me he was so happy that he couldn’t contain the smiles or the giggles. BEST welcome home EVER.

It’s been four months since I became a mom – almost two months since my last blog post – and little by little I’m getting my mojo back. I delved into my blog archives and made mini sugar-topped monkey bread in muffin tins. It felt good to knead the dough, shape pieces into rolls, then dip them in honey-butter and top them with sugar. You can find the recipe – from September 2006! – in this post about Sugared Monkey Bread. I’ve made many other things from my archives as well – perhaps revisiting old recipes was a form of comfort cooking.

It came as a surprise to me, realizing just how much of myself I share here, with you. Though I have never met most of you I want to thank you for reading – for listening – and for allowing me to pull back for a little while as I figured things out. I’d especially like to thank Jen and Kendra for their thoughtful emails and Renee, for the sweet comment she left today that prompted me to finally explain where I’ve been.

Until next time I’d like to share three more things:

1. A video of our little man laughing at his moose. I like to watch this at work when the day gets especially busy.

Win this book!

2. Let’s celebrate this post with a book giveaway – what do you say? I’m giving away 1 copy of Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes, which is the book we used to make the scrumptious devil’s food cake mentioned above and is my new *favorite* cake book. To win simply leave a comment on this post and tell me what you’ve been up to these past two months. I’ll randomly select a winner sometime next week.

3. A beautiful essay by Anna Quindlen, which a friend shared with me on Mother’s Day. It made me smile. (And also, I confess, brought a tear to my eye – I’m such a sap!)

All My Babies Are Gone Now by Anna Quindlen

All my babies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow, but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach, T. Berry Brazelton, Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education — all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations — what they taught me, was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all.

Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One child is toilet trained at 3, his sibling at 2.

When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow. I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton’s wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.

Every part of raising children is humbling. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the “Remember-When-Mom-Did” Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language –mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, “What did you get wrong?” (She insisted I include that here.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald’s drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?

But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them, sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night.

I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Even today I’m not sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I’d done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.