Sally Breslin: My Life: I LOSE ALL SELF-CONTROL WHEN IT COMES TO BAKING DESSERTS

If there were an organization called “Dessert Lovers Anonymous,” I’d probably be the president.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve lived by the motto: “Life is unpredictable, eat your dessert first.” I’d pass up prime rib and lobster for a chocolate-chip cookie any day.

Being a dessert lover, I used to spend a lot of time baking my favorites from scratch. I’ve never owned a single fish, meat, or vegetable cookbook, but I’ve collected enough dessert recipes to fill the Library of Congress.

So it is with deep regret that I recently had to hang up my electric mixer. A few months ago, the oven in my gas range decided to kick up its heels and drop dead. Seeing it previously had died a few years before and had cost me a small fortune to resuscitate it, I decided that this time, it was going to remain deceased. Nope, no CPR this time.

I also decided I was going to save up for a whole new stove.

And with the way I’m going, that probably won’t be until about 2028.

But on the bright side, not being able to bake actually might be a good thing, mainly because I have a severe problem when it comes to sugar-induced self-control.

Take, for example, the first time I baked whoopie pies. The recipe, an old family secret, had been handed down to me, and I was eager to try it. My husband, whose favorite dessert just happened to be whoopie pies, was even more eager.

So one day while he was at work, I tackled the recipe. By the time I was through, the kitchen looked as if a grocery store had exploded in it. But to my delight, 12 picture-perfect whoopie pies emerged from the mess.

Well, everyone knows that just because a food looks good, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will TASTE good, so I made the supreme sacrifice of sampling a whoopie pie, just to make certain it would live up to my husband’s high standards.

As it turned out, it tasted even better than it looked. In fact, it was so delicious, I ended up eating 10 more before my husband got home from work that night.

“What’s this?” he asked, staring at the one remaining whoopie pie, which looked lost sitting in the middle of the huge cake platter.

“I baked you a whoopie pie,” I answered.

“Only one?”

“There’s no point in making you a whole dozen until I know whether or not you’ll like them,” I said, backing away from him so he wouldn’t smell the chocolate on my breath.

“Gee, it must have been really hard to divide the recipe exactly into twelfths to make just one whoopie pie,” he said, raising an eyebrow, his tone suddenly suspicious.

I smiled weakly. “I um, used a calculator.”

He opened his mouth to say something else, but I cut him off. “All right, all right, I confess!” I snapped. “I made a whole dozen and then gulped down 11 of them! Now are you satisfied?”

He used the “whoopie pie incident” to blackmail me for years.

I lacked even more self-control when it came to baking birthday cakes. For one thing, I always ended up licking the frosting bowl…before I even frosted the cake.

So when I promised my husband I’d bake his favorite cake – a rich, chocolate devil’s-food sheet cake – for his birthday, I vowed that no matter how tempting it looked, I was NOT going to sample it. I was determined to present a completely intact cake to him, no matter what.

As the day wore on, however, I found my resolve weakening each time I walked past the cake. To this day, I still don’t know exactly what came over me, but suddenly I felt possessed by some sort of “cake demon” (maybe that’s why it's called DEVIL’s food cake?), and the next thing I knew, I was holding a knife and hacking chunks out of the cake faster than a lumberjack at a wood-chopping competition.

Afterwards, I just stood there, wiping chocolate frosting off my face and staring at the gaping hole in my once-beautiful cake. Panic flooded through me as I thought back to the whoopie-pie incident. I knew I had to make the cake look as good as new, or my husband never would let me live it down. There wasn’t time to bake another cake, so I decided that because the cake was only one layer and a rectangular shape, I could cut it into pieces and push them back together to form a smaller rectangle.

Unfortunately, I continued to “even out” the cake, eating all the excess I cut off (so there wouldn’t be any incriminating evidence), until I’d reduced the cake from a 9” x 13” to about the size of a postcard.

“What a cute little cake!” my husband said when I served it to him with three candles on it (that’s all I could fit on it by then!) for his birthday that night.

“I baked it just for you!” I said.

“Want to share it with me?” he asked.

I’d already eaten so much cake, I felt as if I were about to give birth to a giant dough ball. “No thanks. I’m trying to cut down.”

I swore off baking after that and bought all of our desserts at the grocery store. One day, however, my mother gave me a recipe for what she said were the best blueberry muffins in the world. Of course, I just HAD to bake some.

It just happened to be blueberry season, so I spent an entire afternoon out in the woods behind our house, battling mosquitoes and dodging poison ivy just so I could pick some wild blueberries for the muffins.

The next morning, as I was making the muffin batter, I absently nibbled on the blueberries…and nibbled…and nibbled some more. By the time I was supposed to add the blueberries to the batter, there were only four left. Not wanting to waste perfectly good batter, I poured it into the muffin tins and baked it anyway.

“What did you make?” my husband asked when he came to the breakfast table and saw the naked muffins cooling on the counter.

“Plain white cupcakes,” I said, smiling brightly.

And he just might have believed me…if he hadn’t spotted the blueberry stains all over my teeth.

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