Fake It Till You Bake It
My two IC cookbooks came in the post yesterday. I was so excited I decided to make a carrot cake to take to movie night at a good friend’s. Well folks. Let me be the first to say how disappointed I was with my foray into baking.
Suffice to say it was not the fault of the cookbook. I must say, I’m not very good at playing the domestic engineer role. I can build a bloody wall to code, no problem. But follow a recipe to the letter and get good results? Can’t do it.
My first goof-up was to not trust the cookbook and not leave the cake in the oven for the prescribed amount of time. I thought it looked done; to my credit the middle did “spring back lightly when pressed with a finger”. I let it cool for an hour and then proceeded to cut the cake in half. The middle inch of the whole damn thing was raw batter.
I did the only thing I could do…turn the oven back on and throw it in again for another 20 minutes. I know it was wrong, but I had no alternative. It was too late to make another cake – or anything else for that matter. As it baked for the second time, I cursed myself out for not following the recipe in the first place. Just who the heck did I think I was anyhow? Betty Crocker? You can’t mess around with baking too much – it’s kind of an exact science.
Surprisingly, once it was iced with cream cheese frosting, it was darn tasty.
Which made me feel a bit less cake incompetent.