It may be a good time to get serious about baking
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- June 4, 2021
- 848
Last week I made the apple charlotte I wrote about in early May.
“I’m just not crazy about baking,” my wife said as we watched a commercial for one of the many baking competition reality TV shows. “I don’t like to go to all that work and have things go to pieces because of a 10% variation in humidity, or the wind kicked up, or because the newspaper guy threw the paper too hard at the porch.”
Baking, and here I mean cakes, macarons and the like, is fussy and requires a great deal of time and effort to master. It’s something you rather have to specialize in to get really good at. The wife of a good friend of mine creates some of the most extraordinary cake creations anywhere in the world, and I greatly admire her for it. But beyond coffee cakes, scones, pies, cookies and such like, learning to get good at baking just sounds like way too much work.
My late sister helped get weddings and other special occasions assembled for many years as a side job and knew, through long experience, who in the area made good cakes and who made rickety, dry creations. I remember attending a wedding at which the entire fancy but unstable four-stacked cake fell over at the reception onto the bride’s dress. Just because someone bakes doesn’t mean they’re good, just as long experience as a chef doesn’t necessarily mean a person can really cook.
We’ve made some berry-topped cakes I would describe as perfectly adequate in appearance and delicious, but icing is not something either of us is very good at. We have some professional piping bags and all that, but we just usually smear the icing on like cream cheese on a bagel. It’s just us after all, and as the mediocrity-defending saying goes, “It’s good enough for who it’s for.”
We also have a cake turntable that has never seen use; same goes for one of those wire cake slicer doodads that perfectly cuts a round cake layer in half through the middle. Our intentions were good when we bought them.
I make a great German chocolate cake and a very nice carrot cake, neither of which require any kind of finesse.
I think you also need a really good oven to get good results. Of the five or six ovens I’ve worked with in my home kitchens in my lifetime, all have varied wildly in performance. They were all garden variety name brands. It seems every oven has its own quirks and personality traits, and you have to live with it for no small amount of time before you can get the most from it. We currently have a two-oven model, and the lower one is a convection setup. I am learning how this makes a difference and how to use it.
In a regular oven, there is a single, stationary heating element that radiates heat. A convection oven adds fans and exhaust to circulate heat evenly around the food. Some convection ovens have additional heating elements that can cook food faster as well. So far the double oven situation only seems to provide two ovens that are too small to cook anything bigger than a casserole. I am beginning to despair of ever having a really good gas range.
Still, it may be a good time to try and get serious about baking. There is no way I’m ever going to tackle the big Martha Stewart style marzipan and fondant covered fancy cakes. You get good at doing that kind of thing, next thing you know people ask you to do it for them, and that’s way more responsibility than I am interested in.
Last week I made the apple charlotte I wrote about in early May. It was delicious and looked just as it should, but my misses was unimpressed. “That’s a lot of work for some apple sauce pie.”
Awfully good apple sauce pie, if you please.