The first thing I ever baked completely from scratch is a very important moment in my life. I grew up using cake in a box and a tub of easy AKA pre-made frosting. We all know this stuff and I'm pretty sure we all either used it or tasted it at one point in our lives and I at least thought it was the best thing ever!
Perhaps you did as well but Oh how wrong I was ..so very wrong. In this post I'm not going to get into all the "fun stuff" that are in this products, that's a whole different discussion.
It all started when I realized regular college was not for me. To bad it took two years and a few thousand dollars. I always liked baking, and even after I graduated high school it was suggested to me but instead of thinking with my heart I was thinking with my wallet (which a lot of us are guilty of) and I decided to go into the medical field and that just wasn't for me (My biggest hint was I couldn't stand the sight of blood...bleh). So off to culinary school I go! Or so I thought. First I had to prove myself to an organization that helps people with learning disabilities that baking was for me. They sent me to a month program to see if I could handle the pressure of the kitchen.
The instructor was a very nice guy and he was a very good teacher (Which is actually very hard to come by in this day and age). First day in the kitchen was one of the most scariest in my life. He handed me a recipe for blondies with chocolate chips; (A blondie is like a vanilla brownie), then he simply just let me loose in the kitchen. So there I stood, clutching the recipe in my hands, eyes wide, wondering where the heck everything was in the kitchen. I was lucky to run into a student that was really nice and he actually helped me find were everything was. Then I learned, how to really read a recipe. We get so use to the back of the cake box with pretty colorful pictures and big red bold words that plain black text was like a foreign language to me. I literally read that recipe about twelve times before I got all of the ingredients together. After what felt like swallowing the rock in my throat, I started mixing the ingredients together. Which surprisingly, not everything just gets dumped into a bowl and mixed, there are a lot of different mixing methods and folding techniques that go into making any type of pastries. (I will go into detail on that later in a different post). I finally have the blondie batter assembled together, and was given the wrong pan and as it being my first day, I just took the pan without questions, filled it with the batter, and off it went to bake.
As I pulled the blondie out, a sudden realization came to us that loaf pans are only suppose to be used for loaf shaped things, example: Meat loaf, breads, or loaf shaped cakes. Feeling like a failure and starting to really question why I am here, the chef comes over to me and apologizes for giving me the wrong pan to use and even though it didn't look amazing, the taste was to die for. The next day I was given the same recipe with the right pan, and they came out the way they were suppose to (Which was awesome) super chewie, vanilla-gooey goodness. It felt really good to put everything together and it felt like a very good accomplishment. Finally, I was really baking for the first time. Up to this date they are still my favorite thing to make and they are also one of my best seller.
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| Chocolate chip and toasted coconut blondies. |
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