The Great Baking Compromise, pt.1
Hit the sweet spot
Will Rogers:
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
Hey, how’s it going? Hope all has been well in the past month-and-change since I’ve written. I had a crafty Halloween and failed to blog it, I got my kids their first Covid vaccination shot, and I’m working my way up to applying for writing jobs. More on that another time.
I hope you like this piece about cake (heh), and a what-if story that’s more of a vent than anything else.
Headphones
Totally Baked
Look. Here’s the deal with crafting a birthday cake.
Like any personal project, you need to figure out your personal commitment. What part of this do you actually care about? What is worth your time and energy? When you visualize yourself practicing rosettes in icing, do you see yourself smiling or swearing?
I’d rank the basic levels of celebratory dessert engagement thusly:
Bake from scratch, frosting from scratch, multi-layer, custom shape, multiple frosting colors, skilled piping, fondant work, two-and-a-half solid days of intense isolation
Bake from scratch, frosting from scratch, two layers, regular baking pans, two frosting colors, smooshed with a spreader, one piece of fondant work, trying to let the kids help then chasing them away and fixing all their mistakes
Mix by Betty Crocker, frosting by Duncan Hines (trust me it’s better), one big 9x13 pan which makes your cake look like a hill no matter what your theme is, well I got chocolate frosting so no we can’t color it, yes a number candle counts as decoration, no I do not like writing with that gel stuff, yeah you can totally frost it I’m gonna go away now, ok hey at least it tastes good
Fuck this, let’s buy the one in the supermarket case for once
This time I knew I’d fall somewhere between numbers 2 and 3. Now that Audrey is fully in the zone as a Creative Director, I figured it would be more fun to have her help out and have it turn out to her liking, rather than stress over making a goddamn Pinterest miracle.
This particular theme, the popular video game called Among Us, features characters that are very simple line drawings. It’s a great opportunity for a baker like me to make something that looks striking but is actually incredibly easy.
At first, I thought this full character would be simple enough to cut from fondant, minus the shading on the suit, and perhaps only one blue? But then I found that there was plenty of merchandise that featured only the visor. Such an easy way out!
![among us visor" Mask by Nessssa | Redbubble](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LlwN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2b08d23d-df4a-43e0-a7e1-2b2bb7460339_1000x1000.jpeg "among us visor" Mask by Nessssa | Redbubble")
I’m only half-kidding that it was an easy way out. It’s definitely a simpler shape to create, but the results aren’t too far off from each other. Same colors, same striking visual, and it adds an abstractness that I really enjoy. Distilling something down to the boldest of strokes is satisfying, as well as easier to accomplish. You’ll find similar tactics all over Pinterest. It allows for exact, proprietary images to be invoked by less trained hands, such as mine.
I pulled the same trick for Audrey’s 4th birthday, which was Minnie Mouse themed. I sure as hell can’t draw a world-famous, highly specific anthropomorphic rodent, but I can do this (which I adapted from various Pinterest ideas, of course):
(Remember how I mentioned multiple frosting colors? This project was so fun but it did take every bowl I had. I spent a good chunk of 4 days making fondant pieces and a whole day making frosting and putting everything together. Worth it!)
Madame Director
I showed Audrey something with just the Among Us visor during Blue-Sky Project Development, and when came to the actual Concept Design Meeting, she ran with it. She drew the visor, then a cake around it - an oval cake, with the visor towards one end. Basically an Among Us character torso. (I lost the paper because I am still not good at blogging my life.)
She gave me the drawing with a matter-of-fact swagger that I think could carry her far in managing a multi-national creative design syndicate.
“Like this,” she says, pushing the paper towards me and getting up to leave, clearly having more important meetings to attend.
“Ok…in fondant? I am thinking we could layer each color on top of the other.”
“Yeah.” (“Make it happen,” said her dismissive glance.)
“And what color for the frosting, the character’s color?”
“Oh, red. Because sus.”
“Red is suspicious? Why?”
“Because red means danger.”
“So you want your cake to be an imposter?”
“Yeah. Imposter is the best. I always want to be the imposter.”
Note taken.
It isn’t hard to bake from scratch or make your own frosting. It’s just time-consuming. A stand mixer takes away the labor aspect, but it doesn’t make the process much quicker. I think the result tastes better than a box mix, but I know the kids don’t really care. I just didn’t feel like spending time on it, so I let Betty do the work. Delegation is sooo important.
Audrey had drawn an oval cake. I immediately dismissed it in my mind. I wasn’t buying specific pans for this one project. She agreed to a 9x13 instead, but I was kind of bummed about it. I knew it wouldn’t look as good. As usual, her design sense set a visual goal that I hoped to match. Maybe she’d give me a raise.
It wasn’t until I pulled out my baking pans from my horribly disarrayed cabinet that I realized I do have an oval pan - two, in fact. They’re part of a Corningware set that I usually use for serving meats or baking casseroles, not cake.
I looked at these different-from-usual pans and worried about baking times. I’m not exactly British Bake Off material - winging it doesn’t come naturally to me. But I knew the two basic factors used to decipher baking temp and time between vessels: The pan materials and the pan dimensions.
Good baking recipes either recommend a certain type of pan or give you different baking directions for light and dark metal pans. In general, light pans need higher heat for a shorter time, dark pans need lower heat for a longer time. Corningware is a type of glass, which retains heat the way dark pans do. (I get so excited when I actually KNOW SOMETHING without Googling it.)
Don’t invite me to give a TED Talk just yet. The dimensions were a much trickier problem. The length and width of these were smaller than a 9”x13”, but much larger than 8” round. Rounds are used as 2 layers, so you’d have two round pans and half the batter in each, ensuring the pans aren’t too deep and could bake through (with adjusted heat and timing). I did have two oval dishes, but with larger surface area produces fairly thin layers that I could totally screw up. My not-great oven doesn’t heat evenly, and it isn’t big enough to have the two dishes on the same level. I’d have to open it up and rotate them around to have any sort of chance at two matching layers, further complicating the timing and temperature.
In a moment of panic, I poured all the batter into the deeper dish and tried to gauge if it was too thick to go by the 9x13 time. These are measured by quarts, not inches, and I never trust my ability to guess volumes of containers. It seemed incredibly deep, probably measuring nearly 50% thicker.
Still panicking, I put it in the oven, telling myself it would be fine. Box mix can’t miss, right? Ugh, I knew better than that. I paced the kitchen, wondering if I could have a second pass at this. Buy more mix? Take it out and repour half into the other dish? Would I have to wash the first dish to ensure it wouldn’t stick? The pan is probably hot already, the sides already sticking. Did I really have to use the weird pans just to make things difficult? Oh wait I DON’T HAVE TIME for any screw-ups! If I have to start over I’m going to be in a serious crunch for decorating time.
I sprayed the second pan with oil, pulled out the already hot pan, ladled roughly half the batter into the second pan, noted that it wasn’t really baking on the sides yet but close to it, re-racked the oven so I could stick them in one above the other and got them inside.
With the oven door shut I had to do some quick calculations - Amount of time on the box for a 2 layer cake, dark pan adjustment (25 degrees cooler and a few minutes longer), minus a bit of time for the thinness of the layers, plus a bit of time due to needing to open the oven to rotate them, plus my usual calculation of needing at least the full time recommended on any recipe as my oven is less hot than most…and then luckily my brain exploded so there was no need to bake ever again.
When that didn’t happen, I did set a timer, and I was finally in Que Será, Será territory. Sit and wait to do the crucial rotate and check.
When the time came, I rotated the pans and switched their levels, gauging how much more time to give them. I was very surprised to see that they weren’t too far off from each other. When the timer beeped again, I discovered the most amazing thing - both layers had pulled away from the sides in absolute baking perfection. Neither pan showed any signs of sticking, a miracle if you consider how I began with one pan, baked it a bit, and then poured half into the other, completely cold. They had risen very evenly and needed only a small amount of leveling. I slipped out the cakes, shaved off the slight rise in the middle, and layered them up, easy as you please.
Oh and if you want to try something similar at home, cool cool cool, but please don’t use my posts as expert advice. I sure as hell cannot reliably recreate anything I’ve ever done in the oven, never mind communicate it accurately to anyone else and be somewhat responsible for any outcomes. But hey, good luck, champ! Get messy, make mistakes, and only post about the good ones, ‘k?
Whoo boy, this turned out long. Let’s make it part one, and next time I’ll tell you the not-very-interesting story about the frosting and include the one and only photo we got. Cliffhanger!
Heinous Crimes
“Your honor, I purchased this product due to the image posted on Snazz Incorporated’s point of sale website. Please refer to exhibit #1, which I have printed up here.” She held up a poster board. “As you can see, it’s an image of the ‘Snazzy Fridge Magnet’ holding a photograph of a child onto the front of a refrigerator. I purchased the magnet for just such purposes, to display items of reasonable thickness on the front of my fridge. I tend to collect greeting cards from my friends and family, and like to display them.
“Imagine my dismay when the product arrived and it was unable to hold anything more than one sheet of the thinnest paper. Anything even slightly thicker would cause the magnet to fall to the ground. Greeting cards were completely unfeasible. I tried using it to hold photographs, just as demonstrated in this advertising image, but photo paper was also too thick. Not only was the item completely incapable of fulfilling a job anyone would expect of a refrigerator magnet, it also failed to fulfill the promises of the advertisement. Thank you.”
The judge turned to the other podium. “Your defense?”
“Your honor, it is a refrigerator magnet, meaning, it adheres to refrigerators. The image on our website is meant to demonstrate that some papers can be used with it. You cannot say what kind of paper would be used in this scenario. We at Snazz Incorporated maintain that this image is perfectly accurate if you print your photos on regular paper, as many people do.”
“So, you agree with the plaintiff’s assertion,” asked the judge, “that your product cannot hold up anything thicker than standard printer paper?”
“Yes your honor, we concede the point,” replied the defense with a dismissive wave of a hand. “But we maintain that the imagery and accompanying literature make no claims otherwise.”
The judge paused, studying the advertising image. “Hmm. Ok. I’m ready to rule.” He nodded at the court clerk, then looked out at the courtroom.
“Under the Common Sense Act of 2037, it is within this court’s jurisdiction to find whether the product fulfills its purpose and whether it seeks to trick or shortchange the consumer.
“The paper secured to the fridge in the image is shown to be a photograph. It is Common Sense to assume that photographs are printed on photographic paper. It is also Common Sense that a fridge magnet should be capable of holding a greeting card onto a refrigerator.
“There are refrigerator magnets that do not hold items at all. ‘Fridge poetry’ and the like are examples. They are not advertised to hold other items onto refrigerators.
“Therefore, the visual representation of the ‘Snazzy Fridge Magnet’ product is indeed Misleading, and the product itself Fails to Perform within Common Sense parameters.
“The defendant is to Cease and Desist the manufacture and sale of their Snazzy Fridge Magnets immediately. If Snazz Inc. wishes to continue to sell the remaining stock on hand, they may relabel and repackage the items to reflect an honest use case for their capabilities. This process will be overseen by the Product Responsibility Coalition. Snazz Incorporated is also hereby subject to a full investigation by the PRC. Any and all other products and/or services funded, designed, manufactured, packaged, or distributed by Snazz Inc. must be vetted to make sure that this instance does not indicate a pattern. Any of the above that does not meet Common Sense standards must be corrected or discontinued as per PRC policty. Responsibility for all costs incurred from this investigation and oversight will be passed directly onto Snazz Incorporated, as will the standard legal fees incurred by the prosecution.”
The judge banged his gavel.
“Next case, please.”
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think about cake or consumer trust issues or anything else via the comment button below, or message me privately at jenniesloan@substack.com. Talk to you soon.