Top 10 Things That Could Go Wrong While Baking

This is the December edition of the print version of After the Bubbly, an award winning family humor column. If you’d like to see it in a local publication, let me know and I’ll do my best to get it there!

I make comments in my cookbooks when I try recipes—things like ‘excellent,’ ‘needs more salt,’ and ‘kids loved it.’ What I wrote after a recent traumatic cake baking experience is not suitable for publication. If my cookbooks survive me, it will be a testament to my descendants of their grandmother’s battle with baked goods. I don’t know why I torture myself with baking ‘from scratch’. I ought to stick with recipes printed on the back of a box with a red spoon in the corner. If you dislike baking—as I do—the baking knows it, and it messes with you.

Still, me with my optimism and the deceptively simply recipe with its butter and eggs. It was a pound cake. What could possibly go wrong?

For the record:

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

2.  You could decide to get some bang for your bake by doubling the recipe. However, now that you have flour, all those ingredients don’t neatly fit into your fancy mixer—the one that still matches your kitchen even though you haven’t it 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 getting started—what exactly 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. They are rectangular, like a loaf pan.

5.  You could skim over the part of the recipe that says sift and whip egg whites until they’re stiff—whatever that means—and therefore underestimate the time effort, and skill involved in what you thought was going to be your basic dump-stir-pour operation.

6.  You could decide that instead of the handy mixer to whip the egg whites, you’ll do it by hand, which could result in a nasty cramp in your right bicep.

7.  You could ignore the visual evidence that the cake batter does not fit into the aforementioned loaf pan. In fact, you could fill it all the way up so that it’s almost spilling out before it even goes into the oven. Then you could be so grateful that the whole drama is in the oven that you don’t even mind cleaning up the holy mess in your kitchen. You might even smile as you’re wiping down the last of the flour.

8.  You could smell something familiar: smoke.

9.  You could then spend thirty minutes cleaning the scorched batter overflow from the bottom of the oven and transferring partially cooked cake-like material into other 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 delicious, resulting in rave reviews and requests that you ‘make this more often.’

By the way, in case you’re wondering, a tube pan is the same as a Bundt pan and it has a far greater capacity than your average loaf pan. Again, who knew?