If you are either one of these types, you're doing something wrong.
I can't advise you if you are the second type, as I am not that good a baker (mercifully), but if you are the first type, dear reader, I have just one word for you: chillax. Honestly, it'll be fine.
Baking is one of my favourite things to do. I find it relaxing, soothing and rewarding, from settling down with a cup of tea and a cookbook to decide what to make (a permanent favourite of mine is How to Be a Domestic Goddess, signed by both my aunt and the Goddess herself), to licking the bowl once the cakey thing is in the oven. I'm not going to be all smug and say that everything goes perfectly every time - I regularly curdle cake mixture when I put the eggs in, but to be honest, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference - and if I'm in a bad mood, horrendous things happen. Seriously, if you're feeling grumpy or rushed, don't even bother. You'll just end up resenting the cake, the cake will get offended, sulk and just not rise. I had to make a birthday cake once, not out of choice, but out of 'oh, Jinni, you've got loads of essays to do, but I can't bake and X is out tonight, so can you just whip something up for Y's birthday tomorrow?'. Note the lack of 'please' or 'thank you'. So I made this chocolate monstrosity that just sat in the cake tin, didn't do anything and tasted of sludge.
However, if I am baking out of desire rather than duty, then the cake looks and tastes a hell of a lot nicer. Just look at these blueberry muffins:
Don't they look pretty? I made these for a super cool road trip to Derbyshire, to do some impro at the Methodists annual conference - rock and freakin' roll - and they seemed to go down pretty well with my three fellow road trippers. (Yep, that's three muffins each. No point in being stingy.)
A few months later, I took a train to Cornwall, again to do some impro, and I thought that I would make some biccies for the journey. There were ten of us this time, which meant there would have to be quite a lot of said biccies, so I enlisted some help in the form of my friends Nicky, Maria and Rhiannon. Now, I like making biscuit dough, I don't mind cutting it out, but I find decorating them rather tedious. I end up doing things like this:
This is all very well and good, but very fiddly and requires a level of detail that I just cannot sustain for fifty biscuits. Luckily, the others were a lot keener on the decorating than I was and produced such gems as these:
Sorry, it's upside down and I have no idea how to reverse it, but if you care to crane your neck, you will notice that the giraffe has been modified into a unicorn, the boxing kangaroo has a black eye and the dragon has been shot. Now, that's proper decorating.
I quite like baking just for the sake of it though, without a special occasion in mind. I made these a little while ago, partly because I felt sorry for an open bag of dessiccated coconut in the cupboard that was just sitting there, feeling sorry for itself:
Ta-da! Raspberry and coconut muffin cake thingummies. No reason, just there. Feed on, flatmates.
I am also something of a loser, which is why I decided that baking two Madeira cakes from two different recipes and doing a taste test was a really cool way to spend a weekend. The first was a James Martin recipe, which was fine, but the crust tasted quite dry. The second, which was also the winner, was a Nigella recipe, which avoids having a dry crust by sprinkling the cake mixture with demerara sugar before you put it in the oven, so it goes all nice and crunchy:
It looks a bit rubbish there, but I can assure that it wasn't, it was brilliant. I served it with a side of modesty.
Right, it's nearly time for dinner, so I will leave you with just one last thing, a photo of a product that I really want to find a recipe for, just so I can buy it:
Snigger.
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