You Always Remember Your First...
I have been watching a lot of baseball this summer. I am not a huge fan, but I like to veg out watching sports, and I don’t care for soccer, golf or NASCAR. What really interests me about baseball are the hitting streaks and slumps that seem to affect almost all players. It doesn’t seem to matter if they are home or away, who is pitching, the quality of the basemen and outfielders; sometimes they are hot, sometimes not.
It seems to happen to bakers too, or at least it is happening to this baker. For the past 3 weeks, I can’t seem to produce a quality bake. Other than a good batch of scones (a bake I have probably repeated more than any other) and a decent focaccia, I have been striking out. It took 2 tries to make a usable Choux paste for cream puffs, and it wasn’t perfect, just edible. My Irish Soda Bread was awful, as dense and heavy as a cinder block (breeze block, for my British brethren), truly awful. It actually seemed to weigh more baked than it did when I put it in the oven, which defies the laws of physics. My football player son, Josh, liked it, but he does not always have a very discriminating palette. He had just come back from a week in the mountains at football camp, and after 4 practices a day, might have eaten road kill. Three different attempts to produce a decent White Cob loaf failed all 3 times. Over proofed, dense, weak crust. Collapsed cakes, soggy bottom tarts, scrambled egg custard, and some sad looking savory biscuits continued my slump. Even today, I tried to make a strawberry mousse pie with a shortbread crust. The mousse just would not set, too runny and slack to even attempt to fill the crust. The mousse became a semi liquid topping for ice cream, and we ate the shortbread crust as shortbread biscuits. In all fairness to myself, the shortbread was really good, but overall the dessert was another failure.
So, after more than a year of baking, I seem to have lost my mojo. I have deliberately been putting off trying croissants and macrons, two skills I am eager to master but too timid to attempt in my current state of mind. Frustrated and demoralized, I am trying to recapture the same spirit of fearless experimentation I started this journey with last year. I started baking over the 4th of July Holiday last year, and my first bake was a Mary Berry recipe for an English Walnut cake.
I saw this cake baked on the Great British Bake Off. It looked delicious, a walnut sponge with a buttercream and meringue frosting topped with candied walnuts. This cake seemed like a good starting point. Everybody likes cake. I have cake pans. I love walnuts. It is not an overly complicated recipe and yet was challenging enough to satisfy my urge to bake. I forged ahead, assembling all the equipment and ingredients and then whipped out my brand new digital kitchen scale. I weighed and measured and mixed and chopped and whipped and baked and candied and frosted, following the recipe with the care of a surgeon. Once my cake was finished, proudly displayed in the over priced covered glass cake stand I had bought for the occasion, I surveyed my creation. Not terrible looking, considering it was my first bake. The layers were even, the frosting was white and shiny, the candied walnuts were, well, candied. My family eagerly (perhaps bravely) lined up for a piece.
This is where I learned an important lesson about the nature of baking, the element that makes baking so frustrating and so intensely satisfying. You can follow a recipe to the letter, measure every ingredient perfectly, and not get perfect results. Baking lies at the crossroads of art and science. It is not just mixing stuff together and always achieving the same result. Technique and skill and experience are just as important as precision of chemistry. Time, environment, and intuition play a big role as well. I began to realize why I found baking so alluring. It is not something anyone can pickup and do well just by following the instructions. It takes practice and experience to do it well. It is also science; a bake is a chemistry experiment, with sugars and proteins and acids and enzymes interacting with each other to produce a result. Then it becomes an art, with shapes and flavors and flourishes elevating a science project to something beautiful and delicious. All these elements are tangible. They can be learned and mastered through repetition and practice. It is the intangible aspect that can’t be taught or learned. As corny as it sounds, you have to love it. You have to be passionate about it. If your heart isn’t in it, right there in the batter and the dough, it will never be great. It will never be the perfect marriage of art and science, not without loving it.
I loved baking that cake. It wasn't perfect. The sponge was a little dense and dry, the meringue was a tad gritty, the buttercream was good, the walnuts a little hard. My family seemed to enjoy it, and so did I. Most importantly, I had a ball making it and couldn’t wait to bake something else. I had found a new passion and was ready for more. I knew what I wanted to make next. Time to bake bread.
It seems to happen to bakers too, or at least it is happening to this baker. For the past 3 weeks, I can’t seem to produce a quality bake. Other than a good batch of scones (a bake I have probably repeated more than any other) and a decent focaccia, I have been striking out. It took 2 tries to make a usable Choux paste for cream puffs, and it wasn’t perfect, just edible. My Irish Soda Bread was awful, as dense and heavy as a cinder block (breeze block, for my British brethren), truly awful. It actually seemed to weigh more baked than it did when I put it in the oven, which defies the laws of physics. My football player son, Josh, liked it, but he does not always have a very discriminating palette. He had just come back from a week in the mountains at football camp, and after 4 practices a day, might have eaten road kill. Three different attempts to produce a decent White Cob loaf failed all 3 times. Over proofed, dense, weak crust. Collapsed cakes, soggy bottom tarts, scrambled egg custard, and some sad looking savory biscuits continued my slump. Even today, I tried to make a strawberry mousse pie with a shortbread crust. The mousse just would not set, too runny and slack to even attempt to fill the crust. The mousse became a semi liquid topping for ice cream, and we ate the shortbread crust as shortbread biscuits. In all fairness to myself, the shortbread was really good, but overall the dessert was another failure.
So, after more than a year of baking, I seem to have lost my mojo. I have deliberately been putting off trying croissants and macrons, two skills I am eager to master but too timid to attempt in my current state of mind. Frustrated and demoralized, I am trying to recapture the same spirit of fearless experimentation I started this journey with last year. I started baking over the 4th of July Holiday last year, and my first bake was a Mary Berry recipe for an English Walnut cake.
I saw this cake baked on the Great British Bake Off. It looked delicious, a walnut sponge with a buttercream and meringue frosting topped with candied walnuts. This cake seemed like a good starting point. Everybody likes cake. I have cake pans. I love walnuts. It is not an overly complicated recipe and yet was challenging enough to satisfy my urge to bake. I forged ahead, assembling all the equipment and ingredients and then whipped out my brand new digital kitchen scale. I weighed and measured and mixed and chopped and whipped and baked and candied and frosted, following the recipe with the care of a surgeon. Once my cake was finished, proudly displayed in the over priced covered glass cake stand I had bought for the occasion, I surveyed my creation. Not terrible looking, considering it was my first bake. The layers were even, the frosting was white and shiny, the candied walnuts were, well, candied. My family eagerly (perhaps bravely) lined up for a piece.
This is where I learned an important lesson about the nature of baking, the element that makes baking so frustrating and so intensely satisfying. You can follow a recipe to the letter, measure every ingredient perfectly, and not get perfect results. Baking lies at the crossroads of art and science. It is not just mixing stuff together and always achieving the same result. Technique and skill and experience are just as important as precision of chemistry. Time, environment, and intuition play a big role as well. I began to realize why I found baking so alluring. It is not something anyone can pickup and do well just by following the instructions. It takes practice and experience to do it well. It is also science; a bake is a chemistry experiment, with sugars and proteins and acids and enzymes interacting with each other to produce a result. Then it becomes an art, with shapes and flavors and flourishes elevating a science project to something beautiful and delicious. All these elements are tangible. They can be learned and mastered through repetition and practice. It is the intangible aspect that can’t be taught or learned. As corny as it sounds, you have to love it. You have to be passionate about it. If your heart isn’t in it, right there in the batter and the dough, it will never be great. It will never be the perfect marriage of art and science, not without loving it.
I loved baking that cake. It wasn't perfect. The sponge was a little dense and dry, the meringue was a tad gritty, the buttercream was good, the walnuts a little hard. My family seemed to enjoy it, and so did I. Most importantly, I had a ball making it and couldn’t wait to bake something else. I had found a new passion and was ready for more. I knew what I wanted to make next. Time to bake bread.
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