Not Rising

I have to accept the failure and appreciate it. My bagels are not rising. It is not a personal thing and I shouldn't take it that way... but I do.

Dear yeast in my dough,

Why do you refuse to rise? I have given you sugar and let you sit in a warm place. Please, I don't mean to rush you but I need to bake you. After an hour of rising time, I saw little difference in size. Why? What did I do wrong?

Please let me know so we can work this out. I don't like the separation between us.

I miss you.

XXX

Exchange out some words in the message , and the text doubles as a letter to a friend after a fight - normally a letter from middle or high school best friends. How history repeats itself, from high school to baking, still amazes and amuses me.

A few weeks and several good and bad batches of bagels later, I stopped baking. Like all phases in my life, I was done with it and needed to move forward. No one moment sparked the end point but seeing frozen bagels in the grocery store might have done it.

My conversation topics changed from the rising of bagels to Egyptian politics and novels I was reading. My friends no longer got plates of bagels or heard about my latest efforts into making blueberry or cinnamon raisin ones. My waistline reduced a bit with the decrease in carbs which made me realize it had increased when I started this tangent. My kitchen was cleaner. I stopped feeling the failure of my non-rising bagels.

What direction would my baking had gone to if yeast worked properly for me? Would I had ventured on to other baking horizons? Or would I, like with the high school friend, have eventually ended up where I am today?