high-bar baking

My ego isn’t tied up in my baking. That might sound strange to anyone who’s heard tell of the “sobbing in front of the oven before lemon friend’s birthday” incident of 2021. But it’s true.

I know I’m good. And I don’t need you to tell me that. My confidence doesn’t hinge on your opinion; we’re way beyond that. The only person I need to please is myself. Don’t get me wrong, I love when people love my work. And I will absolutely go out of my way to find the perfect recipe to make someone’s day special. I want to resurrect your childhood, and I want you to be stoked about it.

But no amount of consolation is going to smooth over the fact that the cake was a little dry. The texture was great, and the flavour was… normal, but the cake was dry. I’m not afraid to say it. I know it’s the truth. And I’m not afraid of the truth. It doesn’t make me any less skilled at my craft to admit that this wasn’t my best work. In fact, it kind of opens up opportunities for the magical days when it actually is my finest work. Sometimes I nail it. Other days I don’t nail it. And that is ok. Every day cannot be Christmas morning. Then it wouldn’t be special. 

But more than just “consolation would be ineffective” — consolation is unnecessary. I don’t know if people think I’m out here playing golf or what, but my (metaphorical only!) game is baseball. This is a batting average sport. I don’t have to hit it out of the park on every swing. I can bat .400 and hit plenty of singles and still go down in the hall of fame. 

I didn’t even write the recipe! I tried something out for the first time. If I’m going to be too afraid to fail to even try, I don’t belong in the kitchen. Is there a kitchen you ought to be failing in this week? 

So the white velvet cake I tried making wasn’t all that special. If you need a white cake, the Two Chicks from the Sticks Grandma’s Almond Snow Cake still, well… takes the cake (Sorry for that). This one was pulling away from the sides while it was still raw on the inside — I had to keep baking it!  

Sarah wins the Ermine Buttercream wars, as if that was a thing. She beat out Two Chicks (lumpy?) and Lagerstrom (tasteless?) and Zoe (not as amazing as I dreamed it would be, considering I sacrificed a vanilla bean?). The texture’s simply unsurpassed, and it’s not that sweet of a frosting. If you were wondering, a principle problem with Ermine is that it absorbs flavour like crazy. The solution is to add more flavouring until it tastes right. That’s normal and ok. Here, I worked too hard to get to purple and had to add some more vanilla to mask the chemical-y taste of the gel food colouring. Straight purple got me to grey, so I had to add blue and fuscia, which was just a lot of dye by the end. Why is purple such a challenge? 

A perfectly serviceable cake for a lovely evening. Still fulfilled Julia Child’s core directive:

“A party without a cake is just a meeting.”