Food for thought – baking can meet a child’s kneads
As you read this my daughters will be cursing me. Not out loud, of course, because it’s Mother’s Day, but under their breaths. They asked me last weekend how I’d like to celebrate and because I do not want them wasting their hardearned money on an extortionate café breakfast, I said I’d like to have brunch at home. Specifically, I asked them if they could recreate the gingerbread hotcake with caramelised pineapple, crème fraiche, lime and bee pollen I ate on a recent travel assignment.
It was exceptional, a cross between an upside-down-cake and a tarte tatin and while it sounds a bit tricky, I have faith in their ability to find a recipe which at least approximates those flavours. They could skip the bee pollen. Now I know this sounds a bit princessy: “My mum went to a swanky resort and all I got was a demand to recreate a fancy breakfast.” But there was motive in my madness. You see I have detected a threat to our younger generations’ financial health far more insidious than their beloved avocado on toast.
It looks benign, delivered with cutesy branding and feel-good promises, mostly via TikTok, but our kids are falling victim to a scam which could leave them penniless for years to come. The culprit? Cookies. And croissants. And tarts. And Basque cheesecake. And doughnuts.
Delicious and unthreatening though they may seem, bakeries are fleecing our kids of both their dollars and their sense. These Instagrammable cult offerings are springing up everywhere and seducing our offspring with $15.50 pain au chocolat, $65 Kilo cookies (they feed 6-10 apparently) and $10 three milk bombolini, a doughnut filled with dulche de leche, ricotta cream and topped with yoghurt icing which, in the spirit of investigative reporting, I may need to try.
If you see teens lining up on a city street more than likely you’ll discover it leads to Lune Croissanterie, huge in Melbourne and about to open a flagship store in Sydney, or Brooki’s Bakehouse in Brisbane which recently had a pop-up in Sydney and has fans begging for a London outlet.
Butter Boy, A.P Bakery and Rollers are other strong players in the Great Bakery Scam of 2024, leaving our offspring sweetly sugared but their bank balances sliced. Granted, their creators are geniuses for having come up with a product which feeds mouths and the all-important social media but, seriously, you can bake your own batch of cookies (please can we call them biscuits?) for less than a fiver.
Croissants require a little more skill but are completely achievable, as are Basque cheesecakes and Portuguese tarts. Shortbread, underloved in my view, has just three ingredients.
Baking for family and friends is not only the gateway to self-sufficiency, it’s a route to happiness. The reason my generation was taught to make scones in Home Economics – note the instructive nod to “economy” rather than the subject’s current rebranding as Food Technology – was not because scones were a basic food group but because they’re cheap, fast and easy. With cooking a sense of capability is everything.
Yet our kids no longer have that sense of accomplishment, both culinary and economically. Uber Eats has left them unable to turn on the oven and often they only consider cooking as a life skill when it comes time to feed their own babies.
Worse, the supermarkets are pandering to this prolonged adolescence and the sense of uselessness it breeds with more and more convenience items. I thought pancake mix was a joke considering you only need flour, eggs and milk but now you can get pre-chopped apples, pre-grated parmesan (Matt Preston’s personal nemesis), peeled potatoes and tubs of pomegranate seeds.
The UK’s Marks & Spencer is now selling two-packs of pre-poached eggs at five times the price of an egg you cook yourself. Competency in anything boosts our self-esteem, which is why I’m troubled that kids are, rightly, nourishing their mental health but becoming ever more dependent on others to feed them.
A friend left her 20-year-old nephew at her home in a seaside town while she travelled overseas for a week, only to learn on her return that he’d survived on tuna and pasta. He said he was unable to find meat in the local spar. “Did you try the butcher?” she asked. He hadn’t thought of that.
Neither has this op-shopping, planet-saving generation seemingly considered how eco-friendly it is to make a sandwich or salad at home rather than buy a packaged version from a shop.
Anyway, I’ll keep you posted on my gingerbread hotcake. I don’t care if it’s inedible, the joy of the two of them muddling about in the kitchen, filling the house with baking smells, is the best Mother’s Day treat of all.