For my final dish I decided to bake a carrot cake... with the help of my aunt who knows a thing or two about baking. The process was a lot harder and longer than I thought it was going to be. Just grocery shopping for the ingredients took an hour and a half! Then the actual cake took about three hours. I used a recipe out of a cooking book I found at Michaels. The recipe looked easy, but apparently you have to know a thing or two about baking to be able to follow it. For example, the recipe called for white sugar and brown sugar, but the directions told you to add the sugars (plural) instead of telling you to add both... that is where I went wrong. I forgot the brown sugar, and did not realize until afterwards. The good news is that the cake still tasted very good. (My aunt called in low-cal because it had less sugar.) Baking a cake from scratch was definitely a lot harder than just buying the cake mix and adding eggs, obviously. In order to bake well you have to be very meticulous and patient. My aunt told me before I started that she learned that her best baked goods were those where she was precise about how much of each ingredient she added to her treats. I noticed that is the main difference between cooking and baking. When you are cooking it doesn't matter if you put a little more of one ingredient in than the recipe calls for, but when you are baking it does matter. Another thing that was very complicated about baking this cake is which type of ingredient to buy. On the grocery store shelf there are many different brands of the same exact thing, so I found myself buying what I knew and that was sometimes the most expensive! It is definitely saves you money and time to just buy a pre-made cake rather than baking it yourself. By the time it was over (at 11:30 at night) my friends and I got to enjoy the cake I had baked... in a quarter of the time it took to bake it. To me that seems like a complete waste of time to slave over a cake that is gone right after it is done!
~Lauren
No comments:
Post a Comment