Self-Taught Homework #11: You rediscover efficient mania & bake 4 desserts in 7 hours
You spend a full Tuesday prepping and baking for a bachelorette in the false idea of being generous and having a clear direction.
In anticipation of disappearing from your regularly scheduled life for a bachelorette on Thursday, you bake cheesecake bars, apple turnovers, individual soufflés, two layers of chocolate cake in a seven-hour stretch on Tuesday.
Thank goodness you did. Your Sunday hangover after the six hours in the car dissolves your thoughts as soon as you formulate them. You lost your credit card, your glasses. Even taking a bath and narrowing down a dinner option drains your brain. Any time you have to bend to pick something up, your headache blooms.
Where cooking is an improvised trial, baking is precise. It’s a different mental muscle. Throw cumin in a chili, and the smell changes the kitchen, and you can immediately dip your spoon into the pot to taste the transformation.
With baking, you can’t (or aren’t supposed to) consume the raw ingredients. Outside of taste, the balance is required for the chemical metamorphosis from batter to baked good. An extra pinch of salt impacts the chemistry. An egg yolk unintentionally added with its attached albumen deflates the rise.
You’ve never been a scientist, you’re much more of a cloudy abstract thinker, but in the seven hours that you bake, you measure and mix and bake with a detailed focus you haven’t felt in a long time.
In a distant memory, you loved Betty Crocker in elementary school. Your mom always stocked a plastic bag of oatmeal chocolate chip in the pantry. You threw the bagged powder, the butter, the oil in the same bowl and mixed, mixed, mixed until combined, then you balled the dough and threw it on a baking sheet. Ridiculously easy.
You conflated this ease for a natural prowess at baking and not a corporate experiment in a simplified at-home baking experience. It would all work out, you believed, even when you tried new things, things that aren’t common for a reason.
In seventh grade, you and your friends bought a pie crust and blueberries from a nearby supermarket to make a pie, and you came home to find you only had an 8x8 cake pan. You all baked the pie recipe in the cake pan. The pieces collapsed into mush, it was delicious. You all decided you would start a bakery called “Pies R Squared,” that you revolutionized the definition of pie, but you never baked another square pie.
A girlish part of you, you speculate, has wanted to bake all this time while an adult piece of you has rushed to something more urgent, threatened that we don’t have enough time for little sweets.
SOPAPILLA CHEESECAKE BARS
When you push a spoon against the perforated line of a Pillsbury crescent roll, you find nostalgia in the canned pop as the pale dough explodes through the opening.
It’s good to make your own doughs, but it’s great to find a recipe with refrigerated alternatives.
In a metal pan, you lay the crescent triangles on the bottom of the buttered pan and push them together with your pointer fingers. A whipped mound of cream cheese mixed with sugar lands on top of the dough. The second Pillsbury tube opens. You press the crescents together on top of the cream cheese, a wobbly foundation compared to the thin metal. The cream cheese pushes up through the cracks and overflows over onto the second layer of dough, though you ultimately blanket the mix with the stretchy edges of the dough. You dump too much melted butter on top of this final layer to adhere a cinnamon sugar topping before it bakes for 25 minutes.
There’s a blessing in having such clear directions. You listen to Sally Rooney through your headphones, you disappear into a robotic obedience to the recipes, and there’s a quiet relief of joy.
You started therapy again this month. The socially appropriate response to this announcement, you suppose, is “Good for you!” A gold star toward self-improvement. And your therapist would have to help you unpack that desire for approval.
Lately, with the unorganized spool of time without a regular job, you want direction: if wet ingredients whisked with dry ingredients are baked at 350 degrees, it will rise. You don’t know what the formula is to your rise. Part of you is trying everything, reading everything, applying to a disturbing amount of opportunities across a range of sectors. There are internal commands—post more, write more, submit and pitch more—that veil themselves as commands, but when you move to act, you realize that there is no plan.
Another part of you, separate from adult part of you that goes goes goes past the little things, is operating as an emergency parking brake, instilling a friction to make sure you don’t move too fast toward something dangerous but slowing you down to a snail’s pace for the simplest life decisions. A constant reach for everything while fighting against a self-imposed seat belt.
But today, you can bake as many things as you want to organize your time, because baking is clear, and the sugar rush of productivity rushes through you. Clear recipes and easy obedience. Bake the bars, onto the next.
You’re grateful when the sopapilla cheesecake bars come out of the oven, and you and Luke eat them together between his meetings, and his eyes close for a few seconds as his signal he really enjoys something, and you’re relieved that you made them right.
APPLE TURNOVERS
Another great example of a supermarket dough saving you time. Warmed in your increasingly hot kitchen/living room with a constantly-on oven, the phyllo dough sheets are loose. They almost come apart when you pick them up to roll them out.
The mash of apple is wet with juice. You shred some ginger into the apples with the lemon juice, the sugar, the salt. When you bake a second batch, you forget about the ginger and haphazardly throw in more salt than you should.
You take a pizza cutter and cut the first dough into six rectangles, then you realize you need to make them squares. You press the cuts together with your fingers, hoping the phyllo will hold like the combined crescents did. This is what happens when you’re not precise. When you fold the rearranged squares into triangles, the phyllo slices open again. The turnovers resist staying together, and the juices leak and caramelize on the pan, because you insist on baking them anyway.
And, ultimately, the batch comes out okay. One batch is too gingery, the other too salty, but both taste like apples, and you feel confident you could keep trying this recipe, and you’d be happy to have more of this in your future kitchen.
The best part of baking is there is always too much for one person. Baked goods are made to slice into tiny, single servings and share with a larger group. They’re little celebrations. A bake sale, a group of kids, a baby shower, a birthday. Eating a whole tray of brownies feels terrible. Leaving that tray of brownies out for someone else to involuntarily snag, helpless to the lure of sugar, is magic.
When you arrive at the bachelorette with your squished desserts cramped and cracked from the cooler, and the kitchen table at the Airbnb hosts a beautiful bar of s’mores supplies and hot chocolate toppings and powders, you realize you should’ve checked with someone before offering a gift that the guest of honor already has.
As you baked, and you forced Luke to try prototype after prototype until both of you crashed early from a sugar comedown, you wondered about the transactionality of gifts. A good gift-giver expects nothing in return. You perform your love as acts of service, which is an action presented as a gift. As much as you want to give selflessly, a piece of you tallies your actions to account for something, to have the sacrifices amount to some longer life through another person’s appreciation or reciprocation. Your smarter self knows that is coercion, but your instincts serve others much better than you ever serve yourself, and you wish someone else would take on the weight of your needs.
You microwave the turnovers one morning, but the travel has mistreated them. They are leisurely breakfast treats, not plastic-boxed cookies. Their bellies crack open, exposing the apple filling.
You throw them out when no one is looking, quietly relieved no one notices. Next to the homemade waffle bar, the turnovers on their tiny plate were loud, and they were a delicious first step, but no one owed them a thing.
LITTLE RASPBERRY SOUFFLÉS
This past Saturday, for a belated birthday excursion, you toured bookstores. The grey weather and wet sidewalks drove foot traffic into all the bookstores you visited. You joked all the other customers were Sims, walking blindly behind you as if walking into a wall or a couch or another immoveable object, waiting for it to move itself. By the time you wound up in Manhattan to your third bookstore, a used cookbook bookstore in the Lower East Side, you overheated in your winter coat and sat on a green wooden chair looking at Tiffany’s hosting books, and your brain short-circuited.
In contemporary bookstores, you recognize the selections from newspapers, from literary prizes. You find a comfort in recognizing the covers and authors for the books you have and haven’t read in the prominent tables boasting new releases or beloved bookseller choices. In a used bookstore, you have a glaring gap of context outside of the few cookbooks everyone has in their kitchens: Julia Child, Joy of Cooking, Thomas Keller. Though older recipes are reckless with fats and dairy and cholesterol and diner’s futures, a recipe from 70 years ago will have the same techniques and ingredients available today. The result can be the same. Recipes are timeless, any cookbook would deliver you a new pathway to cook or bake, but there’s a reluctance to build your new cookbook library around a book without recommendations or credentials.
You purchased three white ramekins, two Dinkelacker beer glasses, and no books.
Those white ramekins become the gateway to mini soufflés. The right equipment opens doors to try new things as much as a newly discovered recipe.
You boil butter, sugar, and raspberries into a liquid in a small saucepan. The jammy mixture is a dessert on its own, and you’re tempted to stop where you are and enjoy the runny, sweet berry compote. You whisk egg whites loudly in the bathroom while Luke joins a virtual meeting. You fold the egg whites into the compote, and you follow the recipe precisely, but the little soufflés in the oven collapse on themselves.
You’ve heard of this as a cliché, a collapsed soufflé and the shock and scandal it would bring in an elevated kitchen. This is not your kitchen, and you’re happy for it. This is only for you and Luke tonight. One weepy extra soufflé stays in the fridge (though you never looked up the storage requirements, if this fragile dessert is even made to be stored).
You’re not sure what the final result was supposed to be. You can’t remember if you ever ate a soufflé before, transparently, so this one with its sharp pucker and sweetness and deflated top and runny base is the best you’ve ever had.
CHOCOLATE CAKE
This was the recipe you have dreamed about.
Since your cancelled birthday, since you noticed you collect videos of cakes in online folders, since you considered a baking week, this is the cake you wanted to make.
You always loved a chocolate cake. As a five year old, you only wanted vanilla ice cream, then your grandpa made you try a chocolate soft-serve from McDonald’s, and you have loved chocolate first since then. Baking a multilayer cake feels like the graduation from your Betty Crocker baking habits. You want the elusive dazzling staple in your toolbox. Once it’s baked, you want it out of your house so you don’t eat the whole thing alone.
You have two cake pans, and you can’t find a third one at the dollar store where you bought the other two a few months ago. Rather than risk buying a new, third pan that isn’t the same size as the others, you consolidate the recipes to a two-layer cake. The cake batter, after frying out your sweet taste buds, breaks through as a mature, rich contrast. The cakes rise with a large dome that you slice off with a bread knife. You cut somewhat diagonally, impacting the base of the layer you’ll need later. The bright side is there are a lot of thin, cookie-like pieces to dip into the raspberry mix or eat alone, and it’s the chocolate cake you wished it would be.
You Google “transporting cakes” and discover it’s harder than you think. One vlogger packs an insulated cooler in her suitcase to travel with baked layers, and you realize you may be out of your depths.
But you try anyway.
Thursday morning, before you pack all your ski gear for Vermont, you whip together the frosting. You are short one egg yolk, and when the frosting is a darker brown and more thick than the buttercream in the video that spreads like a cloud and has a creamy coffee color, you blame the ingredients. Everything goes into a cooler, where it’s smushed.
At the bachelorette, you tell yourself you’ll frost this cake. You packed a cooler stuffed with desserts, including the foil-layered wraps and a Tupperware of homemade frosting, but there’s never the right time to announce a cake. You are up and moving for 48 hours, and you feel weird calling attention to yourself and your cake at someone else’s party.
At the end of the weekend, you pack these cake pieces back into your cooler, and when you bring it home, your brain on empty, you break the chocolate disc into pieces to dip into the open Tupperware, like chips and dip.