Skip to main content

The Joy of Baking

Having baking as a hobby was always a challenge for me, especially because I have a habit of getting angry and blaming the recipe rather than myself. It seems obvious now, of course, that I was to blame for all the burned food I prepared. But now that I am trying to be patient with myself and not rush the process, I am seeing better results. I finally understand how baking or cooking can be fun! 

I used to be jealous of people who would eat good food at restaurants and be able to recreate the dish at home. My goal is to become one of those people. Because let's face it, we can't always go to a restaurant to eat good food. Plus, something about the sense of accomplishment makes the food taste better. There's something relaxing about taking your time and cooking something you love. Eventually, you start to think of ways you can improve the recipe and add your touch to it. Like, yeah cookies are cookies but mine have coconut flakes. Which makes them better. 

The euphoric moment of getting a recipe perfect after so many failed attempts is amazing. Yes, I am speaking from experience. 

So, a few days ago I wanted to make a Castella cake. It's supposed to be easy. All you need is cake flour, eggs, butter, milk, and vanilla extract. Easy! So, what you do is get your cake flour and mix that with some melted butter and milk. You separate the egg yolks and whites, the yolks go into the flour mix, and the whites are whipped till they have a soft peak. After mixing everything together, the batter goes into the oven with a hot water bath to add steam. (Here's my source) Everything looked simple. I had only had to go out for one ingredient, everything else was at home. I was ready to go. 

But, if I'm honest, that cake almost broke me. I cried over my failed attempts of making that cake, that's how much it was getting to me. Now, you may be thinking this was an overreaction (and it probably was) but the thing you need to understand is that this was supposed to be easy. I underestimated the work that would go into making this cake something you can actually eat. 

My first three attempts were awful. The bottom of the cake was completely underbaked and I couldn't figure out why. 


We had fun eating the top layer though. The only thing that could be eaten on that failed attempt. I tried three more times. I tried whipping the eggs more so that they were stiff, I tried making the melted butter at a hotter temperature, and each time I was getting close and closer to my goal. The secret was the water temperature. The recipe specified the water should be at 80 degrees celsius, and mine was at about 75 degrees. I got a thermometer specifically for checking food temperature, tried again, and...it worked! 


Not perfect but we could eat it! After three failed attempts my only goal was for the cake to be something we could eat, and it worked! I learned something from each failure, I improved my strategy, and I picked myself up and tried again no matter how horrible it felt to fail at something that was supposed to be easy. Turns out, learning from your mistakes is a useful skill. Who knew? 

Making that cake was so worth it! Because now, I get to start adding my own twist to it! I'm thinking I could drizzle some honey or melted chocolate as it comes out of the oven. It definitely needs way more vanilla than what the recipe calls for. I've found myself in a weird mindset--I actually want to make mistakes. Because then I know what to avoid. This doesn't mean that I want to purposely make mistakes, it just means I want to stay calm and think about how I can improve. I hope that mindset follows me through every aspect of my life. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Sourdough Bread Journey

 I've always been interested in baking bread and I recently took on the endeavour of baking sourdough. Immediately, I started to hear how difficult sourdough bread is to bake due to the the time consuming aspect of baking the bread properly. Even before this journey, I knew that bread-bakers always attributed sourdough to a very difficult bread. So, I started this journey with my guard up, expecting to make many mistakes that would result in uneatable bread.  Guess what. They lied.  I'm not saying it was incredibly easy, there are plenty of lessons I've learned through my mistakes. But those mistakes do not mark a difficulty for me, they mark my accomplishments. I've made mistakes I never thought I could make through my journey of baking sourdough, but they taught me valuable lessons and I don't regret a single mistake I made.  I decided to dust off my blog after taking to a friend about sourdough, and all she had heard about it was that it was the most difficult th...

Students telling their stories

I think the greatest way teachers can help students is by letting them tell their story and paying attention to it. This can be by a short story assignment or just encouraging kids to write. Especially for kids who are bullied--we have a lot on our minds that often goes unsaid because we felt like no one would care. It's important to encourage students to write about their experiences so that they could try to learn from them. A great resource I found, though it seems a little rushed, is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. This website encourages people, student or not, to write a "novel" in the month of November and submit it at the end of the month. What you do is you make a profile so that you can start your novel on November 1st. And every time you write, you copy and paste your progress into their website so they can keep track of your progress. You earn badges along the way and even get some feedback from other users. This is a great way to encourage kid...