By Nimue Brown

I’ve thought about making a cake. I like cake, I buy and eat cake, and I spend a lot of time in bakeries talking to professional bakers about their cakes. I go to cake groups, where people eat and discuss cakes as well.

I’ve read a lot of books about how to make cake. I know about ounces and grams, fluid ounces and spoons and ingredients and temperatures and I’ve bought bowls and wooden spoons and cake tins and muffin trays and little paper things for cupcakes.

I’ve dreamed of the cakes I’m going to make, glorious confections with butter icing and fluffy textures.

I haven’t made a cake, because I’m afraid that it might go wrong. If my first cake is a disaster, will I ever find the courage to bake again? I might burn it, or it might stick, or fall apart, or I might make a mistake. What if I make a cake and no one wants it, or they try it and hate it? Can I bear to have other people criticising my cake? So I haven’t made a cake. I just dream about them, and eat other people’s.

*  *  *

First cakes often go wrong. And second cakes. It can take a lot of practice to learn how to make a cake and even then you might not find you’re totally happy, but need to go off and learn how to do really elaborate icing. Not everyone will like your cake, not least because there are some people who just don’t like cake. Everyone who ever made a cake did so by getting beyond the wishful thinking stage, to the wielding of the wooden spoon. It’s not magic, but at the same time, when it works, the results can be magical.

*  *  *

Books are like cakes. Books are like a lot of things, in fact. They resemble all the other things a person might do that involve risk, uncertainty, effort, likely failure and a need for persistence. First books often go wrong, because of mistakes, or overcooking, or undercooking, or leaving out an important ingredient, or the like. It only tastes as good as the ingredients and there’s only so much damage you can repair with icing.

*  * *

(Actually, I lied in the first section, I make really good cakes, have done for years. I also make things up, sometimes professionally.)

Categories:

0 comments on this article

This thread has been closed from taking new comments.