Day 4: Baking

My Masters year at university was one of the best. I loved my course, I loved the grizzled postgraduate life, and most of all, I loved the fact that during the backs-to-the-wall period of furiously typing and re-typing my dissertation, my contact hours with tutors dropped to an average of one a week. I was expected to write ten thousand words about Robert Browning and the dramatic monologue with the least possible intervention from my tutors, and the independence and isolation suited me completely.


Immersing myself in the intricacies of Victorian poetry and Romantic aesthetics for hours at a time would on occasions leave me mentally exhausted, a condition only a healthy dose of Neighbours could cure.  More often that not, however, my thoughts would just turn desperately to distraction and the need to occupy myself with something, anything, that wasn't throwing virtual words onto a virtual page.  In short I needed an excuse to leave my desk, yet keep the creative juices flowing - and hence I discovered baking.


I've always believed that cooking is art, but baking is science. Cooking requires a reliance on subtlety and nuance, where flair and variation is encouraged.  In contract, baking demands a precision that is rarely required in all but the most gastronomic of cooking.  If a recipe says 125g of flour is required, you need electronic scales to accurately weight that amount.  For 100ml of water, you must revisit your Key Stage 3 Science and check that the meniscus of the liquid is perfectly in line with the mark of your measuring jug. It's an inherent paradox that an English and Music student thrives on such mathematical logic and scientific exaction in as trivial a pursuit as making a cake, but baking a perfect cake is to be so much more satisfying than throwing together a stir-fry.


On this particular day of freedom, I was reminiscing about those days (mainly because I return to my alma mater for a wedding this weekend) and had an urge to bake once more.  I'd recently bought my girlfriend a copy of British Baking by the geniuses at Peyton and Byrne, and within was a recipe for one of my favourite childhood obsessions, Chelsea Buns.  A quick trip to Waitrose later and I began.


At first, progress was serene. Butter was rubbed into flour, salt and sugar added, and then dried yeast with liquid carefully mixed in.  With the addition of a single egg, the dough became sticky but it came together pretty much as it should. As per the recipe I was obviously tirelessly following to the letter, I covered the sweet lump and left it to its own devices for an hour, where I would expect it to double in size.


Returning to the kitchen at the prescribed time, the dough remained resolutely its previous size.  Confused, but not perturbed, I rolled out, dotted butter in the centre, and folded in on itself, before rolling once again.  Here the problems started to occur.  If the dough had risen correctly, it would overpower the butter and welcome it into its folds, but as it was flaccid and stunted, the butter just rose to the surface on rolling, cracking the dough and spurting unattractive yellow ooze from the sides. A misguided attempt to let it rise again produced, unsurprisingly, no results. My yeast lay deadened within the dough, and no amount of coaxing, I thought, would enliven it.


There was nothing for it.  I made the sugary, curranty filling, spread out across the rolled-out disaster of dough, gritted my teeth and rolled. What resulted was a horribly misshapen, Cornish pasty-shaped splodge, fruit leaking from all sides.  The dough cast aside all attempts to seal the fruit within, mockingly splitting at every opportunity and pouring sugar all over my sideboard.  In the end, I just put it in the oven, lamenting an entire afternoon wasted.  What came out was ugly, unsightly - and perfectly, wonderfully edible...

My yeast had woken up, in the nick of time. A splodge had turned, rather euphemistically, into a loaf. It just goes to show - art can sometimes, just sometimes, triumph over science.