Just Not a Baker

I am just not a baker. I really think baking, unlike cooking, is not a skill that can be learned but it is something that you are born with. David bakes like maybe once a month, but everything he bakes, every single time, comes out fantastic. He makes the most perfect chocolate chip cookies, incredible homemade cinnamon rolls, made a loaf of white bread from scratch and it came out delicious the very first time he made it. I have to use italics to emphasize what a baking phenomenon my husband is. But it just further emphasizes how terrible I am at it. When I try to figure out what his secret is, he says, "I just follow the recipe." Well, let me show you what happened recently when I followed a very simple recipe for a pound cake:



The recipe called for the cake to be baked in an 8 or 9 inch "tube pan" (angel food cake pan?), which I don't have. So, I read through all the comments, and one baker said she had made it in a bundt pan and it had turned out great. So, I have a 9 inch bundt pan, and I baked it in that. I mean, how different in size could a 9 inch tube pan and a 9 inch bundt pan be??? As I was pouring the batter in, I thought to myself--this does seem like a lot of batter. Turns out I was right. Anyway, I improvised and made a cobbler for my guests that evening since the cake was totally unusable. Grrr.

Thankfully, I am getting better at cooking. Recently, I have become more adventurous at stir-frying. I have observed here that the key to delicious Asian stir fries is to get the oil really hot, but not let it burn, and then throw everything in and flip and stir it really fast over really high heat. This is kind of scary as the oil is popping everywhere and there is lots of smoke and it is very noisy. But if you cook it on a lower temperature, your food just comes out soggy and just not as good. See, this is an example of how you can GROW and learn as a cook!! Baking, for me at least, is a totally different story.