When I was younger I read those Disney Fairies books and my favourite characters were Fira the Light Fairy and Dulcie the Baking Fairy. I liked Fira cause she was super independent and her attitude totally matched mine, but I liked Dulcie because growing up I was enamored with the idea of baking! I was so excited to grow up and back cookies and cupcakes and cakes and souffles and everything possible. What was wrong with me?
The one thing people fail to mention about baking is how not fun it actually is. Sure, in the movies and t.v. shows and, of course, in the Disney Fairy books it looks great! It's a non-stop fun time that results in you earning a tasty treat! Wrong! The other day I decided to attempt baking cupcakes from scratch. Jess had leftover flour and sugar and assorted baking items from who knows what event from probably months ago that was just sitting in our pantry so I decided to get some baking powder and make some magic. This scheme seemed overly simple. I'm a double major with three jobs, surely I can handle making a batch of vanilla cupcakes from scratch. I wasn't even planning on attempting the frosting, just the cupcakes. Simple as pie, right? First of all, not a single recipe for plain vanilla cupcakes that I found could agree on the order in which the ingredients were meant to be mixed. I know baking is a science given years of attempted meringues, so I failed to see how everyone could do things in a different order and get a decent result. In the end I just had to pick one and hope for the best. I measured, mixed, and made-up everything I had to and it was exhausting. Of note is that all of this was being done in a house that was slowly but surely overheating due to the preheating oven and the small parameters of my tiny house. That quote about human beings and temperatures of survival from Journey to the Center of the Earth was a constant in my mind as I continued towards the promise of vanilla cupcakes.
None of the books I read or movies I watched, however, ever prepared me for the worst part of baking: the dishes. Now, as far as I can tell, most fictional characters let the dishes pile up then have to do them at the end. Most people I know apparently do that as well. I'm not like that. Every time I was finished with an item I washed it, half because I like to be tidy and half because I don't have enough utensils and needed to reuse a lot of them throughout the process. In total I spent more time washing dishes than I did anything else. They just pile up! You even think about baking and you've got a sink full of dishes. And once you bake whatever your baking you have to wash dishes with burnt food attached to wherever you spilled it on the tray or pan and that needs to soak for a bit before you can even touch it. Dishes are the unspoken bane of cooking. It might be fun, playing music while you dance around and painstakingly combine ingredients in the supposed correct order, but you have to stop every 5 minutes to wash more dishes or, alternatively, put it off until the sink and you are both too overwhelmed. There is no in between and there's no way around it. Baking is just dish washing in disguise.
The whole experience took over two hours, far more time than I had planned to spend making a simple batch of cupcakes, but I learned exceptionally quickly that the term simple doesn't apply to baking anything, from scratch or otherwise. In light of all of the above information, I am contesting a previous statement I used: easy as pie. My experience with cupcakes was enough to tell me there is no evidence at all to suggest that 'pie' and the 'easy' belong in the same universe, let alone sentence. Perhaps the phrase was originally created to tongue-in-cheek describe something that is overly difficult but considered simple by laymen. Such a sentiment certainly mimics my own altercation with the baking hobby.
I did, eventually, end up with my cupcakes though! And they were okay. Slightly rubbery and definitely needed more vanilla. I can blame part of their mediocrity on the whole 'first attempt' thing, but I think part of it was my innate internal anti-baking mentality. I wasn't born to bake, despite how much I projected myself onto Dulcie, and without that passion my baking is never going to be anything more than mediocre, which is fine by me. Who'd wanna willingly wash dishes anyway?
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