The Magic of Baking
Running late and slightly too much on my plate is my standard these days. So, I’m not surprised to be 48 hours behind on this writing commitment I’ve made to you and to myself. This happens every December. Not because life is so busy that I can’t keep up. But because life is busy, and I like going all in on the festiveness of the holidays.
I’ve spent most of my last two weekends baking cookies. A few hundred cookies from a dozen different recipes to be specific. I’ve packed them into twenty white boxes with gold string and decorative pine, then mailed them across the country. From Massachusetts to Colorado and many states in between.
What I don’t mail, I hand deliver to places and people that would appreciate some holiday cheer. I have one cookie delivery left for the season that I plan on making tomorrow, as early as I can. (My girls at FedEx Office who’ve helped me mail cookies for years deserve their own stash.) I’d deliver them today, but I still need to make two more kinds of dough first.
Baking is tedious and time consuming, sprinkled with some moments of high stakes stress. But I love it, and the small science adjustments that make the next dozen cookies that much more delightful. I started baking about twenty years ago, and I feel good saying that I’ve gotten pretty good during the decades. I love that things can still go wrong though. And my first batch of cookies this year was the second worst batch I’ve ever baked.
It was my easiest recipe. Something I’ve made hundreds of times perfectly since college. All the recipe calls for is melting a Hershey’s Hug on a tiny twist pretzel and topping it with a red or green holiday milk chocolate M&M. It’s the cookie I always start with, because they use the lowest oven temperature and they’re usually so easy to make well. But this year, they were a disaster and didn’t make it into a single cookie box.
Not exactly a confidence booster before breaking out the dozen eggs and couple boxes of butter. But in that moment, you have two choices. You can quit and let a four-pound bag of sugar intimidate you. Or you can simply move onto the next batch and see what happens. Make one dough and focus on one dozen at a time. When you focus on the dozen in the oven and lose sight of what disasters or masterpieces came before, magic happens.
If you’d like to get more confident at baking, my advice is simple. Choose one staple recipe to make again and again. Chocolate chip cookies or vanilla cupcakes, something like that. Something that you have eaten enough of in life to identify when you’re eating a very good one of whatever you choose. Then bake it. Again and again, tweaking the recipe and your process until you feel proud of what you’re creating. Then you can branch out to oatmeal cookies.
Focus on the bad batches in your past and you’ll never trust yourself to pull the tray out of the oven at just the right moment. Focus on the dozen that’s still raw dough on your counter and you’ll miss the first signs of darkened edges, throwing off your timing. But when your attention is on the tray currently baking at 375 degrees, you’ve got your best chance at wizardry.
There is no exact measuring of ingredients that will give you perfection every time. But you’ll find the consistency of dough you look for in every batch and make minuscule adjustments to get there. Sometimes the perfect cookie is ready 30 seconds earlier or two minutes later than the last time you baked them. It’s frustrating and rewarding when you figure out for yourself that the air temperature, humidity, and oven matter just as much as the flour and vanilla.
I’d wager that people who say they are bad at baking continue following the recipe exactly every time, even when they feel something isn’t going quite right. They might be focused on their task, but I’d guess their attention isn’t on the dozen in the oven. But confident bakers see recipes as guides and trust their instincts to make adjustments. And with enough practice and humility to know that bad batches are part of the process, anyone can be a confident baker.
While the tedious task of baking might not be for everyone, I’ve learned that most people enjoy the gesture of freshly baked goods. The surprised and delighted phone calls I receive after a box of cookies show up on a far away doorstep are proof of that for me. And this year when I’ve hand delivered cookies, the few moments of overwhelmed gratitude are worth every single stressful moment I’ve had in the kitchen this season.
There are a lot of things about the holidays I’m not interested in. But I can get behind letting other people know they are appreciated. Some people write holiday cards or take extra time to make phone calls. I spend time in the kitchen, turning simple ingredients into magic hugs that I can send through the mail.
