My mum introduced me to baking in my pre-teen years. I used to help her make a dozen scones for my siblings and I, on the odd occasion she had a few dollars to spare for eggs and flour. This is how bake day went in our house, we didn’t own a mixer and it always started with me sitting on the kitchen floor, whisking butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until the mix was as fluffy as I could get it before handing the bowl over to my mum so she could do the “easy bit”.
I would beat that stuff until my hands were numb. And then the dreaded question, “Mum, do you think the mix is fluffy now? Of which she would always reply, whisk some more! All the love I had for her sweet scones vanished in that moment, I loathed this process to say the least. Why anyone would go through such pain just to bake a dozen scones was beyond me. Remarkably, no tray of scones tasted like the one before, and yet they were altogether delightful. Her recipes were always improvised depending on what we had in the pantry.
I recall my mum once asking me pass her vegetable oil to add to the scone mix. Too often we had one egg short, but this time I thought she had crossed the line. And the disapproving look on my face was unrelenting as I watched her pour oil into the bowl, "can't she just buy more butter” I thought to myself. Nowadays, some of the best cake recipes use vegetable oil, but on that occasion, this was yet again another one of her spontaneous tricks because we didn’t have enough butter.
Fast forward many a year, I was grown, working and could afford an electric hand mixer. The first time I used my treasured electric mixer, the memories of my past, beating batter, sitting on the floor (we could even sing this as a nursery rhyme) came flooding to my brain as I saw how fluffy the mix was without having to put much effort. My hands weren’t even numb. At one point, I may have thought it was the best gadget ever made because the ease of mixing sugar and butter made me want to bake. But in no time my glee was met with gloom, the right tools in the wrong hands are just as bad as not having tools at all. All I knew how to do was whisk sugar and butter, my mother wasn’t there to take the bowl from me and suddenly I appreciated that the “easy bit” wasn’t as easy as I thought it was all these years.
And this is how Our Story begun!
“All you have to do is whisk the eggs and fold in the rest of the ingredients until the batter is mixed and bake it, it's easy”. I lost count how many times I heard this. I wanted to bake too, I whisked, mixed, folded and did all they said and still my cakes came out worse than they went in. My friends tasted them all, from burnt biscuits to stodgy cakes. I remained unbeaten despite my flops, amused by my lack of baking skills as I threw one cake after the other into the bin. And then one day, I made my first palatable cake, one which my flat mate at that time could stomach, at least that is what she told me. I had found the secret to the mystery of the “easy bit”. I became unstoppable, baking at every chance I got. Dear mum, I can bake a cake and you will undoubtedly relish it!
It takes time & craftsmanship to be a master baker, but all you need to begin your story is passion.
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