Day 7 — My Album of Failures: Home Baking Edition
Nobody is perfect.
Unfortunately, not every day is Christmas. Sometimes you have those days when it seems like nothing is going right or those days when you make one big mistake that makes you want to give up on everything in life. Even worse is when the memory of that same mistake stays on your mind for days, even weeks, months, or years.
Although I classify myself as pretty optimistic and self-loving, I am also aware that I tend to be haunted by a simple mistake forever. I can still recall the scene where I said something embarrassing 10 years ago in middle school as though it happened just yesterday, and even though I know I’m basically a completely different person from my teenage years, I still cannot forgive myself for some things I have done in the past.
Knowing who I am, in recent years, I have started to consciously keep note of the mistakes that I have made in various methods: tweets on my Twitter, a note to myself on Slack, or in my photo album on my phone. I hope that someday in the future when I look back at such records, I will be able to see how far I’ve come since then and assure myself that I am indeed making progress as a developing human being. Although it’s impossible to be perfect, I can at least pretend like I’m slowly nearing the concept of perfection if I know I’m not making the same mistakes over and over.
Looking back at my camera roll recently, I’ve realized that I have come far from the past, or at least so in the domain of my main hobby, baking. I can proudly say that I will not make these mistakes again (no jinx), and therefore feel no shame sharing my disaster photos on the internet. And here I present to you, my collection of not-so-fond baking memories in my kitchen.
The green-blueberry chiffon
Clever me saw a strawberry chiffon cake recipe and went, “Ooh I could probably do this with blueberries, too!”. I was wrong.
Chemistry was one of my worst subjects in high school, so no wonder I didn’t know, but apparently, this colour pigment called anthocyanin in blueberries turns green when it becomes alkaline. And egg whites, the prime ingredient of chiffon cakes, are indeed alkaline. I started off with a beautiful purple-blue blueberry puree and a beautiful, smooth, fluffy batter… and ended up with a horrendous seaweed green cake.
The taste was actually quite delicious, as long as I closed my eyes.
The unpuffed cream puff shell
Cream puffs rank in my all-time top 3 favourite foods, but I, unfortunately, failed at this one. The cream puff shell came out of the oven nice and flat as a piece of an airy sheet of dough. The process of cream puff making involves sticking in a piping tip and stuffing the hollow canal of the shell with cream, which was obviously impossible when the shell had no space inside.
I had to be creative with this one and ended up tearing apart the shell into two and using it as the bread part for some ice cream sandwiches.
The strawberry chocolate tart dam failure
I am just overall terrible at making just the right amount. I’ve been living alone for three and a half years now, but I am still not capable of cooking or baking only for one person. The problem is that when I cut too many carrots to fit in my soup, I will still throw in everything that I’ve cut anyways. The same goes for when I melt too much chocolate to put in my strawberry tart: I will pour in everything that I have.
And end up with a chocolate dam failure like this.
The oozing matcha cheesecake
In my defense, this was my first time baking with a tiny 12cm cake pan. But I obviously overestimated the capacity, and after 20 minutes in the oven baking process, I checked and found the green batter oozing out over the edge. Even if you witness this situation happening in your oven, at this point, there is nothing you can do. I spent the rest of the time just staring at my oven door, watching the batter slowly trickle down the side of the cake pan.
To my relief, the cake did get baked just fine. Moral of the story: more batter is not always better.
The bursting fondant chocolat
At this point, I’m actually getting suspicious of my ability to learn from my past mistakes, as I seem to overfill my cake pans every once in a while. But at least I’ve never made a bursting fondant chocolat since this event happened, so maybe I just need to make the overfilling mistake with every dessert, and then I’ll be safe from such an incident forever.
The flat melonpan disk
It was mid-coronavirus crisis, we were all stuck at our homes with nothing else to do. There was a time when all dry yeast disappeared from the supermarket shelves, and I was part of the campaign. I didn’t even own a bread machine. I wasn’t thinking too well and decided that I would challenge myself to make a fluffy, airy, light melonpan with only my own hands.
But never again. I didn’t even know I was failing until I pulled the bread out of the oven, only to find that my melonpans were flatter than the dome shape I had hoped for. Like three times flatter than what I wanted. The bread was edible and wasn’t bad, but quite dense and definitely not worth the effort of all the furious hand-kneading I had put in. Why bother when I can buy a delicious melonpan for less than 200 yen at my closest bakery?
Overall, I think it’s pretty safe to say that I am slowly but surely learning from my baking disasters bit by bit. My kitchen endeavors are merely a hobby, and there is no pressure or need for me to improve. However, as I am simple-minded enough that my self-esteem rises exponentially every time I succeed in making a slight advancement in baking, I probably will keep being motivated to repeatedly challenge myself and my oven for as long as I am capable of standing in the kitchen.
At least for now, I’ll keep dreaming of the day I become a perfect home baker.
Happy Christmas!
