A Warm & Witchy Hug

Week 3 of My Cozy Fantasy & Food series

This past week was a mess at my home, with heavy snow causing days of no WiFi and power outage blips piling on top of some stressful work projects. Yet I had to laugh when the cozy recipe I tried on Friday turned out to also be a messy fail. It just felt so fitting!

My failed scones and extra spicy chai blend with the beautiful book, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches.

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna is pitched as Practical Magic meets The House in the Cerulean Sea (another cozy book I love) with a smidge of Nanny McPhee. It has all my favorite story elements: fun magic, lovable characters, precocious kids, all different forms of love (familial, romantic, platonic), and my favorite tropes: grumpy sunshine¹ and found family!² I knew from the description I would love it, but it is definitely one of my favorite books of all-time now:

“As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don't mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she's used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos "pretending" to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously.

But someone does. An unexpected message arrives, begging her to travel to the remote and mysterious Nowhere House to teach three young witches how to control their magic. It breaks all of the rules, but Mika goes anyway, and is immediately tangled up in the lives and secrets of not only her three charges, but also an absent archaeologist, a retired actor, two long-suffering caretakers, and...Jamie. The handsome and prickly librarian of Nowhere House would do anything to protect the children, and as far as he's concerned, a stranger like Mika is a threat. An irritatingly appealing threat.

As Mika begins to find her place at Nowhere House, the thought of belonging somewhere begins to feel like a real possibility. But magic isn't the only danger in the world, and when peril comes knocking at their door, Mika will need to decide whether to risk everything to protect a found family she didn't know she was looking for...”

I want to re-read this book every year I think. It’s that delightful! The story does get spicier than I expected, but it felt well done and needed to the story to me, so I didn’t mind. But if you don’t like any explicit scenes, then just skip pages 276-278. It’s such a small part of the book, so it really isn’t a very spicy read.

Chai (Overly) Spiced Scones

I love chai and those warm, cozy spices feel perfect for a book with an Indian protagonist who loves mixing up magical tea blends for her English friends. But something that was far too spicy was my hilarious attempt at making chai scones this week. Thankfully, since this isn’t a cooking blog, I don’t feel any pressure to post perfect bakes. A recipe fail³ is pretty fitting for a blog about overcoming perfectionism with messy creative play. I still had lots of fun and I learned what NOT to do next time. 😂

Part 1 of What Went Wrong: the cardamom seeds

To start, I channeled Mika Moon and tried making this semi-homemade chai spice blend from the same Plays Well With Butter blog that has the scone recipe. I say semi-homemade because the recipe it is just making a mix of store-bought ground spices. Sounds easy, right? What could go wrong? Well, I couldn’t find ground cardamom at my grocery stores, so I bought whole cardamom pods at Wegmans to use. I looked up what to do and it felt fun to try to grind my own fresh spice. I shelled the seeds from the pods into my food processor, thinking that would work perfectly, but the seeds stayed pretty intact. Probably the blades were too big to reach the tiny seeds. I wish I had paused to look up a different way to grind the spices, but I decided to just use them as whole seeds. Huge mistake. The flavor was way too intense and overpowering in the dough glaze, not to mention the awkwardness the crunch that whole seeds add.

Next time, I now know (thanks to more Googling) that since I don’t have a mortar and pestle, I can just use this technique: place the seeds between a folded piece of parchment paper and grind into a power with a wooden rolling pin. Genius.

Part 2 of What Went Wrong: the cream

I wish it was just the spices that I had messed up, but the scones themselves were a disaster. The recipe made it sound easy to put everything in the food processor, but I don’t use mine often, especially for making a whole dough recipe, so it was hard for me to judge how much cream to add. I added it slowly, but did end up adding all of the heavy cream & egg mixture.

I see now that I really should have trusted myself to know when the dough seemed at the right texture. The recipe says “the dough should be slightly wet to the touch” and mine was more than slightly wet. 😂 But I thought after they chill in the freezer, maybe that would be fine. WRONG AGAIN (womp, womp):

Quite possibly the worst thing I have every made. 😂

Seeing as how most of them came out looking melted, I think I just definitely had too much liquid. So, after they cooled, I cut what I could salvage into mini scones and added the glaze. Mike, my wonderful husband, bravely tried one but, after I assured him that I really want his honest opinion and I thought they were awful, he agreed. They are inedible. Too spicy with the whole cardamom seeds and the texture is plain weird. It made the house smell nice and cozy at least!

A wonderful book and a terrible bake.

Part 3: A Happy Ending

This messy end result feels hilariously fitting as a pairing for this book. Mika tries so hard and things all seem to fall apart for her, yet there’s still a happy ending (not a spoiler since that’s always a given with cozy fantasy).

I know even just a year ago, I might have felt really upset about this failed bake, especially after having such a stressful week and this just being one more thing that went wrong. But it just made me laugh. I know everyone makes mistakes sometimes and a bad bake doesn’t mean I’m a bad baker. Playing the wrong chords on my ukulele as I’m learning a new song doesn’t mean I should quit playing. A painting coming out differently than I wanted doesn’t mean I’m a bad artist. It’s all just part of the learning process. And as I heal and play more with my Inner Artist, I am finding the joy in that messy process. I feel free.

So, as I chucked my failed scones into the bin, I decided to repurpose the chai spice blend into the base for a spicy, warm, milky cup of this authentic Masala Chai recipe. Channeling Mika Moon again, I had fun thinking up a cute “whimsically inaccurate list of ingredients” like she does in the book:

A Warm Witchy Brew 

A Masala Chai Blend for The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

13 of the sweetest hugs 

2 tablespoons of grumpy sunshine 

1/2 tablespoon of longing 

and a whole lot of stardust 

For chai: add 2 teaspoons of spice mix to 2 cups water and 15g quality loose leaf black tea in a covered saucepan. Boil, then remove lid & simmer for 5 mins. Stir in 1 cup milk and simmer for 1 minute. Strain & add sugar or honey to your liking. 

This turned out so lovely! I am out of loose leaf plain black tea currently, so I used 2 good English breakfast tea bags and put the spice mix into a plain tea bag, so it would be easier to serve without needing to strain anything. I added the milky tea to 2 mugs and stirred in some honey. Next time, I think I will try adding 4 tea bags and extra spice, so it’s a stronger brew. But just like this book, it felt like a warm, spiced hug and a satisfying end. Highly recommend trying them both!

If you also try the chai scones recipe, please let me know how it goes for you! I will muster up the energy to try again eventually. 😅

Questions for your Inner Artist:

• When have I failed at a creative project before? Would I be willing to try that activity again to find some fun in the process?

No links above are sponsored. I just love sharing the things that give me joy.

1. Grumpy Sunshine trope = when 2 people with opposite personalities meet, one a positive and upbeat person and the other a grumpy and pessimistic person, and learn to love each other.

2. Found Family trope = when circumstances bring unrelated people together to form a new family, often the only loving and healthy family the main character has ever had before.

3. I am fully confident that this is an excellent recipe that I just messed up. So please note that this is not at all a critique of the recipe or the baking blog I found it on. It is very highly rated.