Building the baking foundation

Two months ago, I wrote the first post on #cookingwonders, I put down the benchmark to measure future progress (#Establishing-the-baseline).

I mentioned Grace, a friend of mine, had given me a good pointer on why I can cook by not bake. Since then I have been doing my due diligence, watching numerous videos on the internet, to figure out what went wrong.

I followed diligently but it is just not happening. My cake is not climbing.

Grace had kindly offered to spend a few hours with me to go through the process together. I felt blessed that a friend would be willing to invest time in me to help me acquire the basic baking skills. So I decided to take the day off to enjoy being a student again.

The excitement of taking an odd day off to invest in things I want to learn, coupled with knowing I have people around me who would support me on the journey, has set me in a very good mood the few days leading up to it.

She taught me a couple of simple recipes: Ogaru cake & No knead artisan bread.

Today I would like to proudly present, after my second try entirely on my own, my Artisan bread and Ogaru cake are somewhat presentable and tasty.

Artisan bread is one of the staples in my diet from a young age, me and my family just love bread. Favourite combo is half an avocado and a hard boiled egg. Yummilicious.

Great taste and texture!

A little overcooked...

Just before the bake

Ready for a secondary proof

Although not a staples given the obvious reason, I love Ogaru cake (or 古早味蛋糕), I love its simplicity and originality.

I figured, the reason why the numerous online videos had not help but this one in-person session with my friend had: she was diligent in explaining the rationale of doing certain things. Once I understood the reason for a certain process, it makes application within my control. This allows improvisation which is important: quality of ingredients and the weather are not always consistent, and they are certainly things you cannot control. Bakers' awareness on these two variables will determine the consistency and quality of the final baked stuff.

I couldn't help but to wonder (let me do a Carrie Bradshaw again): isn't this similar to climbing? To redpoint a project, you have to know all your moves especially when passing the cruxes, but if a climber is not tuned in with the body and with the route, you will not be able to ”save” or ”recover from” mistakes, this makes your ability to red point a chance of how many mistakes you managed to avoid, as opposed to letting your body auto-correct those mistakes before they happen. The outcome might be the same, but this separates the real climbers from the rest. Allez allez!