Her Majesty's (Microscopic) Kingdom

HAH!  AHAH!

I'VE GOT IT!

THE BIG, FAT SCONE SECRET!

There's a certain something involved in baking the perfect scone, and I just sat through what may be the only class in the world to let it slip:

You have got to be born in England.

This Wrong-Side-of-the-Pond newsflash was as jarring as the Island Surprise that hit me hard as a child:  my brother Randy announced that I could not be a full-time hula dancer since I hadn't been born in Hawaii.  I was so ticked off at my parents when I heard that crushing truth - and for good reason!  I was left with mere months to decide on another profession before kindergarten started.

Hindsight suggests the real possibility that Randy made the whole thing up.  A ruse to trick me into shelving the hip sway and unhanding his cap gun holster that I used as a grass skirt.  So selfish!  Later on, he and his friend Chip diagnosed me with a hyperactivity disorder - all because I never allowed both feet to land on the planet at the same time for a period of about three years.  I needed that grass skirt.

I had expected a scone baking class to reveal the source of, oh gosh, maybe some extremely rare flour - grown in a secret corner of the world where drizzly mists combine with brilliant sunlight bouncing off ancient stone buildings while that howly flute music floats in over the glen or dale or whatever.

I had no idea I'd have to alter my birth certificate.  Again.

But even before the instruction began, I had blasted this option off my post-retirement radar when our teacher (a compilation of disinterested attitude sifted through with complete boredom and sprinkled with flat affect) dropped several sticks of butter into a big bowl of totally pedestrian flour, followed by several cups of whole cream.

My metabolism squeaked audibly.  It voted we skip the whole chew-swallow-eyebrow-raising scene (ordinarily my favorite part of any warm scone) and just scotch tape those suckers directly onto my behind.

Skip the baking part even.  Just bust out the tape.

Although I'd never baked a scone per se, I had gotten my hands intimately involved with boxes and boxes of Bisquick in the 1970s, so I already knew how much I loved the smell of hot, adulturated flour browning in the oven.

Bisquick taught bakers how to focus on recipes for a brand new reason.  The final outcome was assured - failure was literally impossible - but you were on your own when it came to remembering during that first taste whether you had made the pancakes, the pineapple-upside-down sheet cake, or the cinnamon monkey bread.

They were the only recipes in the whole history of gullets not made better or worse by too much salt, possibly because Bisquick was crowned the White Blood Cell of the Food World - effectively neutralizing every foreign thing in its path.

But man, oh, man - those were some gorgeous coffee cakes!  (Or were those the dumplings?)

Scones turned out to be extremely easy, too, but the ingredients - when arranged just so on the cutting board - spelled out the words DEATH TRAP.

Okay, wow.

Ever notice how your super-hungry stomach growls at the sight of any food?  Yeah.  Mine, too.  Except this food.

The classmates to my right and left got to enjoy the sounds of my carotid arteries chipping away at plaque I've been saving up since the aforementioned 1970s.  (For you youngsters, this was when Bacon Bits were discovered and sprinkled on anything that stood still for 1.5 seconds.)

Those crazy carotids were on a mission!  They, along with several of their closest arterial buddies, were shoveling the plaque piles closer to my brain to make room for orange-chocolate-chip and rosemary-asiago beauties, which arrived hot from the oven and into my mouth exactly 90 minutes apart.

Dang it!

I had naively thought before class that this would be the one - the end of my search.  I'd already formed the perfect future in my head:  One of those quaint coffee houses where the smell of fresh scones mingles with soft, tinkly piano music and wafts into the nostrils of super-relaxed, Intelligent Book readers whose arms and legs drape devil-may-care-ishly across the backs of overstuffed chairs.

This morning that sounds quite a bit like a zoo.  I even see spectators throwing dog kibble.

Another problem with this class was the teacher's technique, which caused my entire immune system to sit up and take pictures.  Measuring spoon dropped on the floor?  No biggie.  I thought he would at least pretend to wipe it on his apron before plunging it into the Costco-sized spice bucket.

After kneading the dough, he passed the giant mixing bowl around the room so all twelve of us could 'give it a pinch.'  A pinch! I wanted to pinch everybody's wrists with my teeth.  UNHAND THE DOUGH!   I felt my thymus attempt to strangle my silent chicken voice box, which just kept drooling as if under the magic spell of scone hypnosis.

Is England suffering an Infection Control Department shortage?  How quickly we forget a few plagues!  Maybe all that jolly good fog muddles the mind into believing a spot of afternoon tea makes everything all right? 

Nothing makes salmonella all right.  I mean - before it happens.  And even after it happens, it's just a bunch of dehydrated finger-crossing and (if you're real lucky) the entire village shouting God save the queen!

Near the end of the baking process, the teacher yawned as he herded us into the tiny kitchen and removed the pan from the oven so we could all test for doneness by pressing down on the tops of the scones.  With our total stranger fingers.

I'm embarrassed to admit that, on some bad advice from my thighs, I forfeited this particularly dicey coin toss.  I ate the scones.

But I have assured my metabolism, my arteries, my brain, and that pesky bunch in the immune system, that I am on the lookout for an especially aerobic form of exercise.  Maybe cricket. 

And this time I shall bring along enough hand sanitizer for the whole crowd.

(Too much dirt and not enough pretty?  Come back next Friday and I'll show you how Container Gardening can fix that very problem.)