It's October! Welcome to CHAOS BAKING!

I know a couple of people who are afraid to bake. They're good cooks, but something always seems to go wrong when they slide cookies or bread or some kind of baked good into the oven. And I can see why they're nervous about baking. We've been practically brainwashed to believe that baking requires precision measurements, careful treatment of every ingredient, and an oven calibrated to the perfect temperature if we're going to get a quality result.

Nonetheless, every now and then it's worth attempting some chaos baking -- just making stuff up to see what happens.

It's easy to forget that people have been making baked goods for a long time, and for most of that time baking was much more a seat-of-the-pants process than it is now. Medieval baking required working with rustic, unsifted flour and a sourdough starter, using no standard measurements to bring a dough together, heating an earthen oven with a wood fire for many hours, then raking everything out so there would be no ash on the bread, then carefully sliding the loaves in, sealing the entry shut with a wooden door that had been soaking in cold water for hours so it wouldn't burn, and leaving the loaves in long enough to bake them through but not long enough to dry them out or scorch them. One way to check oven temperature back then was to toss in a little raw flour; if it turned brown the oven was ready, but if it turned black the oven was too hot.

If medieval peasants could successfully make bread with no measuring cups, no electricity, not even a set recipe -- then we can go a little off script with our baking and still turn out something worth eating.

You want proof? Here ya go!

Right now I have a whole lot of milk that's just gone sour (about 4 cups total), and I'm wanting to do something with it before it actually spoils. Thing is, milk that's just barely soured may not be great on your breakfast cereal, but it's still fine for baking and can be used, cup for cup, as a substitute for buttermilk in most baked goods. I'd just settled on making a homemade sour milk spice cake when I went to the store for supplies.

Well, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a pile of Betty Crocker cake mixes for 98 cents apiece. In this economy, that's hard to beat; I haven't done the math but I'm not sure I could make a cake from scratch at that price. There was no spice cake mix on sale (or even available for purchase), but that wasn't going to stop me. So I changed my mind and grabbed a yellow cake mix. (Also impulsively picked up a six-count of pumpkin spice flavored old-fashioned donuts, which will be important later.)

In the car on the way back from the store, I ate too many of those donuts. Yeah, sometimes I'm not very smart. Captain Midnight doesn't care for old-fashioned donuts and is neutral about pumpkin spice stuff, so I knew he wouldn't want any of the remaining donuts. He doesn't even like frosting on his cake. This spice cake is probably going to be pretty plain --

Oh hey. No it isn't. I have a potentially brilliant idea.

I mixed up the cake mix mostly according to directions, swapping in a cup of sour milk instead of a cup of water, and adding 1/2 t. allspice, 1/4 t. cinnamon and 1/8 t. nutmeg to the mix. (Now it's a spice cake! There ya go.) Poured it into a greased 9x13" glass pan, then did the brilliant thing: I dropped the remaining pumpkin spice donuts into a bag, mashed them into crumbs and used them as a streusel topping to scatter over the top of the cake batter. Baked about 25 minutes in a moderate oven.

Here's the result.

I didn't even wait for the cake to cool down, I just cut myself a corner piece.

NOM.

This is good, but if anything, this doctored spice cake needs even MORE spice. (My English ancestors didn't do insane things to find better spice routes just for their descendants to be terrified of "1/4 t. black pepper" in a recipe, dangit!) I'd at least double the amount of spices if I were to make this again. As it is, though, it's delicious all on its own and would also be great covered with whipped cream or served a la mode. There's no indication in look or taste that this cake was made with sour milk. And the streusel topping was a genius idea -- soft, light cake covered by a crunchy, sugary, spicy topping.

In fact, it was so tasty that the minute I left the kitchen, Charlie-cat jumped up on the counter and helped himself to a big mouthful of cooling cake. BAD CHARLIE. NOT FOR YOU. So now the cake is safely cooling in the oven with the door cracked open because our cats are mad jonesing for our chaos baking experiments.