Not the best baker in the world
A LITTLE LAUGHTER
When will I learn that I should leave culinary pursuits, especially baking, to celebrity chefs like the Barefoot Contessa?
She seems to enjoy being elbow deep in egg whites and cake batter, whipping up baked alaska like it’s child’s play. She seems to understand baking requires unwavering patience, precise measurements and nerves of steel.
Not me. I prefer to eyeball recipes and I’ve always felt measuring was reserved for the persnickety. This results in my baked goods looking like they were made by a toddler.
I had my first baking-related nervous breakdown at the tender age of seven. I got an Easy-bake oven for Christmas that year and I couldn’t wait to inhale my first homemade treat. I poured the German chocolate cake batter into a pan the size of a loonie and slid it under the 100-watt light bulb.
I pressed my face to the tiny oven window and waited. When I saw that miniscule cake rise ever so slightly, I screeched in excitement. I learned baking rule number 1 that day: Screaming while a cake is in the oven is a no-no. The cake fell in the middle and I fell to the floor in hysterics.
Time dulls the harshest of memories. Twenty years after the Easy-bake incident, I found myself face down in a pool of batter on the linoleum floor of my husband’s and my apartment.
It was our first anniversary and I had decided it was high time I used our new springform pans. I would surprise my beloved with a chocolate raspberry springform cake. I threw together the ingredients and poured them into the pans.
I did not know this then, but the secret to springform pans is snapping shut the latch on the side. Once the cake is cooked, you simply unlatch it and it releases the bottom of the pan with your masterpiece intact.
Mine never made it that far. The bottom of the pan, the batter and I (when I slipped in it) ended up splattered on the floor — a Betty Crocker crime scene, if you will.
Over the years, the few cakes that did make it to the cooling rack were nothing to write home about. They never looked anything like the picture in the recipe.
I once spent hours making one that was shaped like a treasure chest for one of our son’s birthdays. I thought I had nailed it until he asked, “What’s it supposed to be?” I hung up my electric beaters for a long time after that.
The Great Canadian Baking Show and Cake Wars aren’t helping. These culinary celebrities consistently elevate sugar and flour to works of art.
Even if I had a week off to bake a 12-layer cake with fondant frosting sprinkled with pink buttercream hearts, I’d sooner sprinkle myself with peanut butter and feathers. I don’t have the patience. Once I get halfway through a recipe, I lose interest, focus and my will to live.
For reasons I can’t explain, as my husband’s birthday approached last month, I got an urge to try making those fancy frosting rosettes. Seriously, how hard could it be?
All I needed was an icing bag, a cake mix and my usual inability to accept my pathetic limits.
On the morning of his birthday, I got to work beating together the oil, water and eggs. After a few minutes of this, I noticed a familiar sensation; I felt like throwing everything down the sink and going shopping, but I pressed on.
I gathered the buttercream frosting ingredients, grabbed my electric mixer and soon became invisible in the cloud of icing sugar dust. I immediately wished I’d softened the butter as I watched chunks of it fly out of the bowl and stick to the kitchen window. Once the frosting was made, I hosed down the kitchen, myself and any cookbook I could get my hands on.
Finally, it was time for the rosettes. I slapped the frosting on the cake because “gently smoothing” it, as per the recipe instructions, took too long and I had one foot out the door at this point.
I filled the icing bag and squeezed out rosettes that were of varying shapes and sizes, despite trying to make them uniform. The squeezing of the bag was very satisfying, but the results were less so; my rosettes looked like discarded blobs of toothpaste.
My husband entered the kitchen and acknowledged my efforts. “What’s it supposed to be?”
I don’t need an intervention to tell me I’m done. I can’t go back there. I just don’t identify as a baker and I’ve finally accepted that. I’ll leave it to the experts, who seem to enjoy rubbing it in my face that cakes are actually supposed to look delicate and pretty.
The next time I get the urge to create something in the kitchen, it’ll be a tutorial on how to load the dishwasher properly. That I can do.
Screaming while a cake is in the oven is a no-no. The cake fell in the middle and I fell to the floor in hysterics.
Colleen Landry is a high school writing teacher, author of humour book Miss Nackawic Meets Midlife and co-author of the Camelia Airheart children’s adventure series. She and her husband are empty nesters in Moncton. Their two grown sons have ditched them for wider horizons. She is filling the void with Netflix, dark chocolate and Cabernet Sauvignon.