I baked a cake today. A birthday cake. Red velvet. I enjoy baking. I’m better at baking bread than cake. Bread requires fewer ingredients. Usually. Yeah. Bread has more steps but fewer ingredients. There’s kneading, which is some work. But it’s pleasant. And I like the whole yeast thing. I get a cup of water, right around 110 degrees. I put some sugar in. I add yeast. The yeast blooms. Then you pop in flour and more water and off you go. Salt.
With cake you’re about to get going then you realize the butter isn’t room temperature. So you wait. Wait for the butter to warm up. It needs to be room temperature. I’m not sure why. God forbid you need buttermilk. The grocery stores around here have one brand of buttermilk. The expiration date? Tomorrow. Don’t sniff it. Buttermilk smells weird. Is this what buttermilk smells like? Has it gone bad? You need eggs and baking soda and salt and vanilla and flour, etc.
Something always goes wrong when I bake a cake. For example. Today, there was no red food coloring. I baked a red velvet cake, you see. I bought red food coloring. I remember the tiny box. I brought my youngest daughter to the grocery store. She sat in the shopping cart, taking it all in. She rarely visits the grocery store. It’s very exciting for her. AVOCADOS! BALLOONS! HOT DOGS! COOKIES! BLACKBERRIES!
I picked the red food coloring box off the shelf. A tiny box. I showed it to my daughter, put it in the cart, paid for it. I see it on the receipt. But I don’t recall unpacking it. I don’t recall removing it from a grocery bag and putting it in the pantry. Maybe it was misplaced. I couldn’t find it. So the cake wasn’t red. Sort of reddish brown. It was a reddish brown velvet cake.
You need to sift flour. I hate sifting flour. I hate cleaning those metal sifters with their tiny, obnoxious holes.
I like baking pie more than cake. Flour and butter and salt. Fun. I like pie crust. I like the potential of pie crust. You can put anything in there. Apples. Pumpkin. Pepperoni. Cheese. You can do whatever you want. It’s a pie crust. Cake doesn’t really work that way. Cake is inflexible. No one wants to eat a chorizo cake. Bread and pie, you can do whatever you want. I also like the little beads you put in the crust when you pre-bake it.
What about cookies? I wonder if anyone would tolerate a chorizo cookie? Maybe it depends on how you make the dough. I would eat it. Pasta, I also like making pasta.