An Ode to Baking

I was watching a video the other day about Synesthesia, the fascinating condition where sound can strike up colours, smells can summon noises and shapes can spark tastes. At the end of the video, the five people with synesthesia were asked what they thought life would be like without their senses blending together. Their answers were one and the same, along the lines of; the world would feel flat.
It’s a pretty good description of how my life feels without baking. Now, I like cake. Eating cake makes me feel like listening to Smile by Lily Allen does. It is a treat, a soaking up of sugar and a grin spreads across my face when someone presents me with a piece of cake. But baking, I love. Baking makes me feel like I am listening to Etta James. It is a luxury, a present to be shared and makes me want to stretch my arms wide and turn on the spot.
I didn’t realise how much I love baking in the same way you can discover you love many things: when it is taken away from you.
I first learnt to bake in the kitchen of my church when I was a teenager. I had made many cakes earlier than this, understand, opening Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course to the well used fruit cake and royal icing recipes for Christmas, and one more when each birthday came around. But this baking was freedom. Empowered by the knowledge that if I matched the amounts of butter, sugar and self-raising flour and a rough guess at the number of eggs, we had complete freedom. Students, twenty-somethings and older people all the same will never turn down a still warm piece of any cake, whether that be filled with orange juice and melted chocolate, carrot and ground almonds or whatever other packets of leftover ingredients we found in the cupboards.
I took my knowledge off to college at eighteen. When I got stressed, I would vent my stress into beating eggs in a bowl or kneading dough. I would never claim that these creations looked incredible, and I was somewhat unorthodox in my ingredients- one time I reserved telling my housemates that I had put mayonnaise in my lemon cupcakes when I had run out of eggs until after they had eaten them. They were not particularly pleased, but they couldn’t argue with the taste.
Even a few years later, when I was training as a teacher in what I now reminisce as being the most stressful year of my life, I took a long Saturday to bake and construct a gingerbread house from scratch. It looked passable, and fed us all breakfast for a week or two.
The fall from grace came very sharply with two changes in my life: I moved out and became (almost) vegan.
After travelling for a few months, I came back home to find my old housemates had got married, engaged or paired up with a new roommate. So when I moved to the other side of my city, I had to get my own flat. No one wants to eat an entire cake themselves. If you’re a passionate baker, you will have originally made twice the amount needed so you can eat the rest of the mixture as you go. By the time the cake has baked and cooled so you can eat it, you are already slipping into the well earned food nap from the amount of sugar consumed. Living alone lost baking half of the charm: it was no longer a way to feed the people you love around you.
Secondly, after a spate of popular and not entirely factual Netflix documentaries, I stopped eating egg and dairy. Two of my basic ingredient bases, gone. If I wanted to bake now, I was going to have to go back to my early childhood and follow a recipe. Adult life has enough steps to follow already- why would I want any more?
So my bowls got pushed to the back of the cupboard, and my icing sugar began to clump with moisture, forgotten.
But Etta James cannot be forgotten. And all the vegans I knew baked, one professionally. I kept seeing their chocolate laden brownies, chewy cookies, homely traybakes popping up on my Instagram feed. And whilst watching a bunch of people talk about how Synesthesia adds colour to their lives, I thought about Etta and the smell of bubbling caramel. My whisk was calling me home.
The recipe was a simple one- salted caramel cupcakes. They are a call back to my old days; slightly ugly but soaked with love and calories. I still have to admit, I haven’t quite figured out how to balance out the cleanliness of the baking soda and vinegar in the recipe. But they are still soft, light and something I can take to the sofas tomorrow as my old group of college friends gather to watch Great British Bake Off.

