Some days my abilities to bake seem to have just flown away and left me behind. 95% of the time I’d rate my baking ability between good and great depending on what I’m making, but some days I look at the baked good sitting on the stove top cooling and just go “how?!?”
Once, while trying to proof some croissants I let them get too warm. I’d made them two to three times before, but somehow I got distracted and wasn’t watching the temperature. When I came back to the kitchen I saw the croissants I had doggedly poured hours of time into laminating sitting in little pools of butter that had leaked out of the over-warm dough. My stomach just about dropped to my feet. I cooked them anyway, hoping I hadn’t lost too much butter and my family, bless them, ate the croissants. They were crunchy and brittle because too much butter had come out of them and they’d basically fried themselves, but my sister and parents were kind enough to thank me for them anyway.
Sometimes it’s yeast problems. I’ve usually got a good track record when it comes to yeast but some days it just does not want to work with me. I’ll sit there and temp the water or milk, measure out exactly how much sugar and yeast the recipe asked for and the yeast will just not cooperate. The worst part is that I can smell the yeast from the bowl, so it’s not like I’ve killed it, it just… doesn’t want to “rise and shine” or something today. I think that’s almost the worst part. If the yeast is dead you can just chuck the dough because you know it won’t work, but when the yeast is kind of there you keep thinking to yourself “maybe it just needs more time”? Until the sunk cost fallacy kicks in and you decide to bake the dough anyway because you’ve already put so much time, energy and ingredients into it it would be a waste to get rid of it now.
And finally there are times when user error really gets the best of me. I once made a cake, got it all mixed up and in the pan and had turned around to pop it in the oven only to realize the reason the batter was so thick was because I had left the milk sitting on the counter behind me. I cannot describe the sensations that went through me as I stood in the middle of my kitchen with my perfectly greased and level pan of batter, staring down the milk and going “HOW did I forget that.” The moment of panic as I weighed the pros of scraping out my pan, cleaning it, re-greasing it and then trying to mix the milk into the batter while trying not to over mix the cake. The cons of either re-making the cake batter or putting the cake into the oven as is, even though it’s going to be dense as a brick and have a terrible texture and I’ll have basically given up on the cake before it’s even begun. I managed to get the batter back into the bowl and tried to very carefully mix the batter as little as necessary to get the milk incorporated. I think it came out tougher than I wanted but it was still edible, so that was a win!
As much as I would love for everything I make to come out perfectly every time, I’m only human. There will be mistakes, either from my own actions or from the fact that as exact a science as we can make baking there will always be things we can’t control. So long as most of the things I bake turn out tasting good, I think that’s good enough for me.
