10 Ways to Screw Up Baking, A Cautionary Tale

I like to make little comments in my cookbooks when I make the recipes. I write stuff like ‘Excellent’, ‘Needs more salt’, and ‘Kids liked it’. Last night I made a cake, and after the traumatic experience, I wrote next to the recipe: Pain in the ass. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I detest baking. And before I was about twenty, I didn’t know you could even make a cake that didn’t start out from a box with a big red spoon on it.

But really, how hard is it to make a pound cake?

Well if you hate baking, I believe that the baking sort of knows it, and then it messes with you. Here are just a few things that could go wrong:

1.  You could be out of flour. Turns out this is a baking deal breaker.

2.  You could decide to double the recipe (because you may as well get some bang for your bake, right?). Except that all those ingredients don’t really fit in your $300 mixer – the one matches your kitchen and that you haven’t used since the last time you were delusional enough to bake something, which was a couple of Christmases ago.

3.  You could neglect to ask – before embarking upon the recipe – what the f#!k is a tube pan?

4.  You could assume said tube pan is pretty similar to a loaf pan because the name of the recipe has ‘pound cake’ in it, and you’ve seen pound cakes. Plenty of them. You know those suckers are rectangular, like a loaf pan. But you’d be wrong.

5.  You could fail to read the part of the recipe that includes intructions to sift and to whip egg whites until they’re stiff, whatever that means.

6.  You could decide that instead of using that handy mixer to whip the egg whites into a stiff frenzy, you will just do it by hand. This *could* result in a nasty cramp in your right bicep.

7.  You could ignore the visual evidence that the cake batter is not fitting into the loaf pan. In fact you could just fill it all the way up and hope for the best. And then you could be so grateful that the whole drama is in the oven that you don’t even really mind cleaning up the holy mess that has become your kitchen. You could even manage a smile as you’re wiping down the last of the flour off the granite.

8.  You could smell something familiar: smoke.

9.  You could then spend thirty minutes cleaning the scorched batter overflow from the bottom of the oventransferring  partially cooked cakeage into more pans of various shapes and sizes – none of which are ‘tube’ pans.

10.  You could serve the cake, which despite your monumental incompetence is actually quite tasty, resulting in rave reviews and requests that you ‘make this more often’.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, a tube pan is a bundt pan (thanks Mitzi!), and it has a far greater capacity than your average loaf pan.

Heads Up: I have a contest coming next week – please check back – I even have prizes!!!