baking: does it come easily to you?

Lol, tbf when I was a kid mum always talked in dashes and dabs and dollops, drove me barmy.

Pinches are fine. Trying figuring out if a dash and a bit and a shake are 3 diff measurements or the same thing

I like "a knob of butter" and would measure everything in knobs if possible

i have measured out my life in knobs

a murder of butter

a gaggle of eggs

lex, do you watch your bf when he cooks, does he talk about what he's doing or why?

re: drizzling, my food improved when I filled a spray bottle with olive oil. Spritzy spritz, kale chips

I think I like baking better than cooking

probably the hardest thing about baking is getting to know your oven

gonna invent a camera that you can install in your oven and it routes to your TV

then i'm gonna get 3 miniature astronaut figurines and put them in there and watch them melt

RIP Apollo 1

that's one small step for flan, one giant leap for meringue pie

irl lols

the treacle has landed?

lex, do you watch your bf when he cooks, does he talk about what he's doing or why?

i watch with much the same i-don't-even-know-how-you-do-that awe that i would watch a magician. it makes me feel even less like i'd be able to do it myself! occasionally he asks me to grate "some" of an ingredient and refuses to tell me EXACTLY how much just because he's amused by the ensuing panic. once he asked me to peel a potato and when i looked round he was in hysterical laughter and i still don't know what i was doing wrong :(

Well thats just mean, he should be showing you how to do it! Thats how you learn!

oh i think he knows i'm not that interested in learning

it being a completely lost cause etc

Our house mirrors Shakey Mo's in that I'm the cook and Em's the baker, by and large, but I probably still bake more often than she does, but that's largely down to the fact that I exercise more than her so have no guilt about eating cake.

My baking is limited to cakes, though, and big ones at that (i.e. not cupcakes or any other single-portion fiddly shit). I make loaf cakes quite often, mostly a banana one, and brownies too. My brownies are fucking incredible.

After I've made something to a recipe a couple of times I have to start improvising though - I now use a different sugar for my brownies, and mix in some ground pistachios at the end, and so on, and I add rum and dark chocolate chips and more ginger and cinnamon than specified into the banana cake. I guess that comes from improvising whilst cooking though; I feel a need to personalise stuff. But if you get a good recipe and you've got a decent oven and all the equipment and the right-sized baking trays etc, you should be fine as long as you follow the instructions.

This is how Em bakes - she doesn't like cooking, though unlike Lex she can peel potatoes and will thus help out with stuff at least - by following a recipe exactly. She likes the reassurance of being able to follow instructions closely, and she's made all sorts of breads and cakes that way. I wish she'd do more but she's quite impatient in many ways, and if she doesn't do something perfectly first time she can get frustrated with it and give up.

if em has that attitude i'm surprised you're shocked at other people disliking cooking, because that getting frustrated when something doesn't come out right is exactly why i refuse to even try cooking these days.

Em doesn't even refuse to try, though, in fact she's eager to help out more in the kitchen now we have much more space there.

Understanding cooking is, I imagine, a long slow process if you didn't grow up doing it. I think watching your bf cook my help with some of your anxiety around it, even if you never end up really caring about learning to do actual cooking. Xps to lex

eh, none of the ppl I grew up w/ did any degree of cooking as children/teenagers, I don't think it's uncommon. surely it's always a long slow process?

I think it has more to do with the right cookbooks.

I went from grinding pepper and splashing vinegar into cans of chickpeas and calling it an entree to impressing carnivorous inlaws with Delia Smith "pork" pot pies in about four months. Before that it was bad cookbooks making me make bad food. The cookbooks that taught me were Thai Vegetarian by Vatcharin Bhumichitr, Delia Smith Vegetarian, and Veganomicon.

My mom has never cooked a meal since I've been sentient and she was embarrassed and indignant about that fact, and would assure us she was a good cook, and she'd buy pies from local apple farms and tell us she made them (despite visible boxes in the recycling) and we'd not question her lies b/c either way there was delicious pie

imo it's a combination of growing up with it as just1n3 says, and innate skill

i dunno how much recipe books are to blame - it's the very basic stuff i can't do

Was cleaning out a closet full of old books over the weekend and gladly placed all of my Borders bargain rack cookbooks in the donate pile. I have a few cookbooks I trust but yeah, bad cookbooks can be a huge stumbling block. Recipe websites with rating systems = strong contender for best thing about the internet.

I've gotten confident enough at both to put myself in the "good" category, but lots left to figure out. On the baking front, I'm good with cookies, cakes, pies, but have done very little with bread. That's one of my goals for this year.

xp 1000000 yes. My thing these days is just to buy some veg on sale and then google "best savoy cabbage ever" and make some decisions. (The results for "best swiss chard ever" are highly recommended btw)

wrt baking, this was the recipe that made me go "ok I can bake pastry"

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/type-of-dish/desserts/tart/deep-lemon-tart.html

Cake I made for son's 8th birthday last year. He wanted an Angry Orange cake, so I baked it and made the frosting, and my artistically gifted gf did the decorating.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v335/gypsyfrocksbedlam/angryorange_zps5bfd76cd.jpg

xp OK, I just googled "best swiss chard ever" and got something with kalamata olives and capers in it. This goes against all of my food instincts.

one of my favourite cakes ever was this nando's cake a friend of mine made once: http://twitpic.com/1ikpcp

(the chips were white chocolate)

whaaaaaaat

I'm much better at baking than cooking. There's so little wiggle room to baking that I find if you can't do it right you just can't do it; follow the instructions and you're 98% there. But cooking ... there's an improv aspect to it that I can't handle.

I used to cook like a baking recipe: exactly this much of this and that, in this order. Then I made friends with a professional cook/chef who was like WHAT are you doing? Put in your aromatics, then your veg, then your sauce base, then your liquids, etc, and I started to realize that it's just about a pattern and not the specifics.

My shortcoming in baking is that I'm not careful about texture that much. I like pie crust because I like flour and butter and the filling that's going to be all over it, but I won't turn up my nose at the exact flakiness of the crust unless it's absolutely leaden, etc. So as long as mine turns out within a broad range of acceptable, I'm not going back and fine-tuning.

If there's one thing I can bake that has a reputation as difficult, it is a decently tender pie crust from scratch. The main keys are minimal water added and minimal working of the dough.

Wau @ Nandos cake.

yeah, i'd say it's more a matter of familiarising yourself w/ patterns & developing intuition about what seems right. some ppl get hung up on the names of specific dishes & peculiar crap, but it's extremely pragmatic. i'm rarely surprised by mistakes when i'm cooking; either i see the disasters on the horizon or i am aware i have no idea what i'm doing & am blindly optimistic.

I actually don't think pie crust is difficult at all. Keep everything cold, including the pie tins, the butter, your hands, the kitchen...put everything back in the fridge or freezer when you're not working it. That's all! There's some evidence that if you do overwork the dough you can save it at the end with a food processor and a bit of added flour, but if you let the butter melt I don't think you can do much at all.

yeah, pie crust is pretty much just temperature and speed - i'm hothanded so i always start by giving the cubed butter/shortening ten minutes in the freezer.

that nandos cake is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

I know some who consider vodka the secret ingredient to pie crust, believe it or not:

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2007/11/cooks-illustrated-foolproof-pie-dough-recipe.html

From somewhere else:

Swapping ice cold vodka for water in pie crust recipes ensures a flakier crust. The liquid makes the dough more pliable to work with, and then evaporates while baking, giving you a lighter result than water.

yes cold cold cold... I worked as a professional pastry/dessert/baker person for many years. I used to keep the scone dry mix on the fridge overnight. I always pour my pie crust water off of ice. Using a little vodka also helps b/c it does not bind with the gluten structure the same way water does.

I mostly ate vegetarian for many years, so I am pretty skilled at Indian food in particular and can make most things but am very much a novice when it comes to cooking meat. Fortunately Laurie is a serious carnivore and meat cooking expert so she usually does the things like whole chickens or meatballs or whatever. She also knows a lot more about fish than I do.

lol xp

Yeeep, my pie crust recp, bequeathed by my mother, also calls for ice water.

I knew all the basics of cooking (by that, I mean I knew how to follow a recipe and understood most common terms) from a young age bc I had to do the majority of the family cooking from 11 onwards. But I hated it, and after leaving home I never really cooked anything - just plain roast veg, or steamed or boiled or sauteed etc. I only got into cooking when I met my totally-useless-in-the-kitchen vegan husband, and tbh I still mostly hate cooking/baking but have a deep fascination with veganizing stuff (even tho I'm not vegan), and that is the only thing that motivates me.

I think I totally lack cooking imagination

i am motivated by a desire to eat delicious/healthy food in a comfortable environment (home) and not pay out the wazoo for it in a restaurant and/or rely on someone else to prepare it and bring it to me. seriously, that is what makes me do all of the shopping/chopping/cooking. cheap + strongly dislike being served/requiring service.

my love of eating completely powers my love of baking. i like baking foods that I love to eat.