I quite enjoy baking, but somehow it floods me with little insecurities. When I was a scientist, I used to read and write reports which were so exactly precise, it was impossible not to reproduce the results if you followed them. Science has to be like that - everything must be completely reproducible and measurable and exact... of course. It was well-crafted and virtually foolproof technical writing. It's not hard to see how I found myself as a technical author, years later.
People who write recipes are not so specific it turns out. That, my friends, is where my little wobble of insecurity comes from, every time I flap open the cookbook.
There are things you must do that are never mentioned - add the milk, flour and eggs in little bursts, for example, rather than dumping them all in one after the other. Assumed! There are discrepancies between ovens, how hot and how long? - most can't even make up their mind which temperature scale to use! Then there are those vague terms that don't really mean anything...
"Is that light and fluffy?" I said to myself, watching gloopy cake mixture drip off the beater. The only things I could think of that were 'light and fluffy' were cumulus clouds and guinea pigs. I reasoned that neither of those things drip (normally*), so I cranked the mixer down and set it off again.
It's all a little bit of an inexact science, this malarkey. Then again, it's not really an art either. You can't make it up as you go along and claim artistic inspiration; there are rules, unspoken principles that make it what it is. And without them, it falls apart.
"Yes, this piece is groundbreaking in its daring audacity, darling. Just look at the way he's broken free of the stuffy formalisms of cuisine traditionel with that bold use of self-raising flour and Marmite."
"By george you're right! You can really see the marks of the blow-torch used to scorch the outside of this wonderful piece. Yet skewer it to its heart and I'll wager the artist expects us to find it soft, white and gloriously crumbly. Extraordinary tour-de-force, wouldn't you say?"
Perhaps some would say that there are rules to art too, but that's a discussion for another time. For now, baking sort of exists in its own curious world of recipes, where following instructions is not enough to compensate for your (my) obvious lack of natural talent for this sort of thing.
As it happened, my cake came out alright (lopsided) - and there's nothing weirder than ground almonds in it. I think they sell these things for something like 50p per slice, so maybe it will make some money for charity.
Probably about 50p.
*Don't think about this while baking.
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