My Baking Misadventure : Lessons Learned From My Baking Fiasco
It was back in 2020 that I decided to indulge myself in cooking. Like all others who were stuck in their houses during lockdown and were looking for some hobbies to keep their mind off, I too decided to find a hobby. Just mixing up ingredients is what baking is and would be easy, I thought. Alas ,I was wrong.
I asked my dad to get me ingredients for baking with the promise of a delicious mug cake .Even though he protested till the end ,he had to relent with one look from my mother . I saw people making easy mug cakes on youtube.”Simple and tasty” they said and I believed it. So, I started off making my first ever coffee mug cake. Cleaned my workspace ,washed my hands and was all jittery and excited to hear praises for my baking skills.
I added ingredients into my coffee cup and didn’t bother to look at the ingredient quantities .Kept the mug in the oven and waited .I was hoping to see a nice tasty looking cake in cup but got a cake as hard as rock. Neither it was sweet nor fluffy.
Unfortunately I made 4 cups of mug cake for all. Dad said it was such a waste of money but he ate it nevertheless, to not make me sad. The only person who couldn’t eat the cake was me. I silently discarded it without anyone’s notice. When I was alone , I reflected on what went wrong.
The first mistake I made was to add all ingredients together at once. There is a function to the order in which ingredients are added and that is to create the right texture . Overmixing can also be one of the reason why my cake came out dry and hard. I didn’t preheat the oven or measure the ingredients. Preheating is done so that the oven adjusts to the correct temperature , which apparently , I thought was Unnecessary. Wish I knew it before, that baking is about both precision and Accuracy.
I did bake a cake later without the prior mistakes but my Rock mug cake was a favourite tea time joke for a month. We all have a laugh about it even now. It was such a fun learning experience. Even failed baking attempts can be valuable learning opportunities. These small moments can bring everyone together and are memorable.
One tip — If you ‘re starting out for the first time just bake a single sample first before baking for all !!!!
PS : Made a small cartoon short on Baking in my channel, Do check out
Thank you Have a Good Day
