How not to bake
Posted by Joanna Roberts on 9 August, 2008
I am RUBBISH at following recipes. I’m not sure why – I can read, I have a logical brain and I can follow instructions – but I just find it incredibly difficult to follow a recipe. I’m sure it’s partly that I’m much better at processing verbal information (audio-recipes anyone?) and partly because I don’t have a way of marking where I am, with the result that I read the same line over and over until I can’t be bothered any more and just make it up myself.
In everyday cooking, I can get away with this. It turns out that when baking, I can’t. On my rare attempts to bake over the years I have produced the following:
1) A giant biscuit – it turns out you can’t produce a feather-light sponge by mixing in the flour halfway through the baking time when you realise it’s still in the weighing scales and the cake’s in the oven.
2) A crunchy chocolate cake – apparently you can’t substitute granulated sugar when you don’t have any of the caster variety. To be fair it was delicious, just an odd texture.
3) (Today) Two dense halves of a Victoria ’sponge’. It seems that when a recipe says to add baking powder, it probably means it.
