Why I don't bake when it rains, and other unsolicited advice from my kitchen
I love baking. For so many reasons. I mean - there is the obvious one - delicious baked goods are not only nice to eat, but they make great gifts, and the occasional bribe. But for me there is also the actual process of baking, whether it is punching down a risen ball of dough before shaping it into a loaf or a plait, or gently folding flour into a sponge and watching it puff up in the oven (through the door of course. You should NEVER open the door on a baking cake!) There is something about the chemistry of baking. I have never quite gotten over wondering how someone could look at a pile of ingredients - none of which taste particularly good on their own - and think “That looks like it would make something delicious!” But the reactions that takes place - from the time that butter and sugar are creamed together, or when an egg white is whipped - has always captivated me. I have always thought that baking was pure magic.
And anyone who knows anything about magic (you know - from the movies or a book) knows that there are always rules surrounding magic. Whether it be a specific spell that has to be said just so (aka a recipe) or the fact that sometimes a potion needs some ingredient from a far off land (the supermarket at the bottom of Rendezvous Hill comes to mind) or that it has to be carried out at a particular time like the full moon - sometimes the conditions have to be just perfect for magic to do what it is supposed to do.
This is just one of the many reasons that I am fairly particular about what I bake and when. One of the biggest baking lessons I have learned (in the various kitchens where I baked) is that the environment plays a huge role in how things turn out. I first became aware of this when I was living and working in Tanzania for several months, and I didn’t realize I would have to make changes to the tried and tested recipes that I had been making for several years while I lived in England. The first thing I tried was chocolate cake, which I was making to take to a dinner I had been invited to, and if I am honest it was pretty disastrous. The biggest factor was the elevation above sea level, which affects the leavening in a cake, and can make it rise or fall. This one fell spectacularly, and I was pretty disappointed. I was fortunate that one of the people I was staying with had a similar experience when she got there, and she helped me to salvage it with the help of a cookie cutter and some butter icing. I learned so many lessons from this experience, you can read about the biggest one here - the first blog post I ever published on this site - but another lesson I learned was that I needed to make sure I followed my own set of baking rules. Here are a few of them - some unsolicited advice from my kitchen.
Never bake when it rains - in addition to the elevation affecting the cake, things like humidity and the rain can also affect my baked goods, especially those that are technique sensitive like baked meringues and sponge cakes. In addition, moving back to Barbados has meant that other aspects of my recipe are affected by the heat and humidity in my kitchen - such as spinning sugar and tempering chocolate. Even yesterday - I attempted to make peanut butter filled chocolate chip cookies (you can check them out here) and this required me to put blobs of the peanut butter in the freezer, and then wrap the dough around it. The dough wouldn’t wrap (my hands were a bit too warm) and the peanut butter blobs were melting fast, so the cookies did NOT work out the way they looked when I watched The Food Network earlier in the morning. So if you live in a temperate country remember that baking in the summer and winter can yield different results, as well as if you move to somewhere elevated or below sea level.
Always be prepared. If you are a scout, brownie or girl guide, then you know the truth in this one. And I am ashamed to say that even as an ex-brownie, this simple one is one that I sometimes forget. Even me after all of these years of baking still get caught out by this, and get halfway through the recipe before realizing that the butter or eggs needed to be at room temperature (or cold for separating) or that I was missing an ingredient or some other piece of kit that would make the recipe a success (like cupcake papers… There is almost nothing more annoying than having a large bowl of cupcake batter and realizing that you have NO papers to put them in!!!!!) In one of my cooking class, they advised us to always have a Mis-en-place - which translates to “everything in place” and that you read the recipe thoroughly and ensure that you have everything ready before you start. And as boring as this advice is - it is one of the best things you can remember if you start to bake.
Never bake at night. This is a personal one for me - and it is practical. Because when I am tired, I forget stuff - like baking powder (this happened a couple of weeks ago) or I doze off and the smell of burning cakes wakes me up. Other night time baking disasters include - turning on the oven to preheat it while there was stuff in there (one of these bits of “stuff” was a knife with a plastic handle which melted and coated the base of my oven… Not pretty) confusing salt for sugar (I was in someone else’s kitchen and as an aside - do NOT have salt and sugar in identical unlabelled containers… you are just asking for trouble!) and trying to double a recipe but only doubling half of the ingredients. In truth - my brain just works better in the morning and so it makes far more sense for me to go to sleep, and get up early to tackle baking.
So what rules do you find are your go-to’s in the kitchen? I would love to hear them in the comments below. And look out for part two of this tomorrow!
And I bring you big love from a small island.
And above you will see what happened last year when I made Danish pastry, on a day when I followed the rules and got a magical result.