With many excellent bakeries in Paris, baking sometimes seems a redundant skill. Your efforts, sweet or savoury, always look a bit amateur in front of those magnificent creations. But there’s still something satisfying about baking, especially baking sweet things. It’s probably the wholly unnecessary nature of desserts, the sense of indulgence that separates them from the more prosaic, essential-for-sustenance parts of a meal.
I bake in response to all kinds of things: Stress, procrastination, boredom, cravings, dinner parties... I like the different stages of baking — the sifting, chopping, stirring, kneading and the waiting — though not the unwelcome surprise halfway through the process, that someone has eaten all the cooking chocolate, or that the tin you thought had hazelnuts now contains fridge magnets. Some aspects of baking in my kitchen are more unreliable than I would like -- such as the ratchety cake mixer and my makeshift bain-marie constructed out of a saucepan. But I have my trusted old tools — an offset spatula, dented cake tins, a food processor and a microplane citrus zester that I will take to my grave — and on the whole, there are usually more successes than failures.
People often believe that you can either be a cook or a baker, that cooks are inventive, off-the-cuff improvisers and bakers are Type-As chained to their measuring cups, mechanically following rules. Baking is certainly a more technical process, but people aren’t intrinsically bakers or cooks. The major difference is that once you close the oven door, you can’t taste the sauce and add more of this or that; no swaps, changes or tasting. And there are proportions and basic techniques to baking, which rely on the chemistry of the ingredients. But after that, it’s up to you.
One of my favourite cookbooks is called
My brownie recipe is a variation on a Nigella Lawson one, and I’ve made it so often that I know the measurements by heart. More important, I now know the proportions. Once you know the functions of the components — the things that add fat and sweet and air — you can adapt them as you like. An extra egg for airiness, an extra yolk for fat and gloss, more butter for richness, less sugar and some fruit for flavour.
Small things can alter everything. I learnt quite late that it’s the flecks of butter in a tart dough that make flaky tart shells. The steam from the butter rises inside the dough, making little puffy air pockets and leading to a flaky crust. Flouring the fruit, adding salt or coffee to teacakes, letting the eggs get foamy or stiff, browning sugar or toasting butter, can all substantially change how your masterpiece looks and behaves. This is also what leads to oven disasters: Lumpy cakes, bumpy cakes, grumpy cakes, sinking cakes, raw pizza dough, cracked fondant, runny icing, ovens that huff and puff, and quiches that have the dreaded Soggy Bottom, made famous by Mary Berry on The Great British Bake Off .
And then there’s the waiting. Stovetop cooking involves constant activity, chopping and searing and sautéing, but with baked desserts, waiting is, well, baked in to the process. I don’t make bread very often (since I became friends with the baker on my street, it feels like a terrible betrayal every time) but I do like to bake tarts. Kneading and stretching the dough is very soothing, with a peaceful, repetitive rhythm in which the heel of your hand pushes the dough away and your fingers bring it back to you. And the whole process — proving, resting, blind-baking — involves a lot of downtime. I like to take my time, bake with patience and care. If you start cakes when stressed, you may make mistakes, and worse, the cake may pick up on your stress and turn out like your mood — shaky, with a little nervous tremble, or depressed in the middle.
Baking is like doing a magic trick, complete with the suspense before the big reveal, then pulling off the lid to reveal the transformation that has taken place underneath.
The inert ingredients — flour, sugar, salt — have billowed into life, puffing and bubbling and flaking, studded with fruit or chocolate or herbs. And all the patience and care you put into your cake smile back to you when at the end of a meal you triumphantly produce a dessert gleaming with peaches or stiff with lemon curd or puddling with chocolate, and everyone’s eyes light up. It’s chemistry, and it’s also magic.
Naintara Maya Oberoi is a food writer based in Delhi; Twitter: @naintaramaya