All About Baking

I started to bake during the covid pandemic. Prior to that, I got by making a simple cheesecake. Let me start something simple. Banana bread. Simple ingredients, few steps, unlikely to mess it up. I followed the directions almost to the tee. Then I tried banana muffins. Alright, it was manageable, and tasty. Before you knew it, I was trying more and more recipes, chocolate lava cake, Swiss roll, cookies, cream puffs, macarons, and all sorts of cakes.

Baking, for the most part, is predictable. You follow the directions, you will get the result you want. If you change something, even one thing, the outcome will differ. Like changing vanilla extract to lemon juice, or mistakenly put salt instead of sugar. What if I can modify the recipe to a better version that I like or that suits me?

My son requested for a strawberry cake for his birthday, the kind similar to a strawberry shortcake. I looked online and found this recipe that I wanted to try. A strawberry checkerboard cake. I baked 2 round cakes, one vanilla and one strawberry flavored, cut them into 2 layers each, then into different sizes in concentric circles, rearranged the circles so that each piece of round cake had alternate colors of circles, just like a target. Then I stacked them up and put icing in between. As for the outer layer, the instructions called for a strawberry jam flavored whipped cream and red coloring. I used blue coloring instead. I didn’t know if it would be purple because of the strawberry jam’s color. I put 2 drops of blue coloring each time and mixed well. After a total of 8 drops of blue coloring, the desired shade of blue appeared. I frosted the entire cake, then added some white whipped cream on the top surface. The finishing touch was decorating with some strawberries and blueberries.

One could easily tell that it wasn’t a store-bought cake. That was alright. With more practice, my skills will be better. The more important thing is that I made the cake for my little guy out of love. I made a slight change in the recipe just for him. There are many things in life we can make small changes for ourselves and for others, to be a better version that serves us.