Ah, baking, the only hobby I've really stuck to
Illustration by Charlotte Trounce
There's a running joke among my friends that if there was a crafting version of an EGOT – The Great British Bake Off, The Great British Sewing Bee, The Great Pottery Throw Down – I would be first to raise the bunting-adorned trophy. This is categorically nonsense. I could probably have a good run at the Sewing Bee, but the speed it demands would soon undo me. And my adventures in pottery throwing were fairly short lived once I discovered that a) it is a prohibitively expensive hobby, and b) I was considerably less naturally gifted than I'd hoped – or perhaps expected. The Bake Off, however…
As a teenager I often forced my mother to spend her Saturday mornings driving me to my favourite specialist baking shop on the A3, and repaid her efforts by covering her kitchen in icing sugar and failing to adequately clean up. But really she asked for it, because she set me off on this sticky path. It was my mother who let me, as an unsteady toddler, transfer eggs from their cardboard nests to the plastic tray in the fridge; who taught me to use a skewer to test if a cake is cooked; how dough should spring back once proved; that 'stiff-peak egg whites' means you should be able to hold the bowl over your head without them falling on it (a high-stakes test). She gave me confidence, and I took it, tended to it, fed it, and it rose into something more.
From the flapjacks in my Hamlyn's children's cookbook I graduated to friands and eclairs, croissants and plaited loaves. I learned to mould flowers and leaves from fondant icing; to pipe delicate butterflies out of royal; to shape round buns, sealed beneath, from unwieldily wet doughs. I made increasingly and unnecessarily elaborate cakes for my friends' birthdays, even my own birthdays, and eventually graduated to making wedding cakes: stacking tier upon tier, reinforced with plastic dowels and cakeboards, decorated with spun sugar, edible flowers, candied nuts, oven-dried thins of peach and pear.
By the early days of lockdown I baked near daily – to pass the time, to self-soothe. In those first, solitary weeks, I heated sugar to just the right shade of copper for salted-caramel brownies, strained fruit for curds with which to sandwich macarons, brushed honey over delicately thin sheets of filo for baklava. I relished running out of a key ingredient: I guess I have to go to the supermarket now, that most precious of outings. Each week I'd parcel up packages of baked goods to drop on the doorsteps of friends who lived nearby – less out of genuine generosity, more out of the true impossibility of eating it all myself.
In my early twenties, in those wilderness months after university and before getting my first staff job at a newspaper, I had filled the days and hours between freelance shifts and unpaid internships running a baking blog, which gave me not just something to do, but a place to write. But slowly, as work became more demanding, as I found creative outlets in other crafts, as I encountered terrible oven after terrible oven in my long series of rental flats, I stopped baking. I retired the blog, and my considerable stash of tins and turntables and palette knives was consigned to boxes in my grandmother's garage. I was, on occasion, persuaded to make a birthday cake, but the desire to bake anything more challenging rarely took me.
Until Good Friday, when, after a night of little sleep, I rose at 4.30am with certainty: today was a day for hot cross buns. I worked until a more sociable hour arrived, and then walked to Sainsbury's to gather what I needed: caster sugar, mixed peel, eggs and fresh oranges, to add to the strong white bread flour, yeast, butter, milk and sultanas I had at home. I was craving once again the rhythm of proving and knocking back; the steps laid out simply before me, demanding little more than time and attention. Into the oven went flour and yeast and hope, and out came hot cross buns, golden and glorious – and a little of my old self, too.
[See also: Joan Didion without her style]
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