Hello my lovelies! There is no recipe today *offended gasp* but we’re gonna talk about something important. One of the most common things I hear from the readers I talk to is that they don’t have much confidence when it comes to baking.
I think one of the reasons for this lack of confidence is kinda our fault. It’s so easy to see the beautiful pictures from food bloggers and websites and feel like those results are normal and effortless. Trust me, they are not even close! All of the pictures you see are the final point in a process of recipe development, baking, re-baking, photographing, lighting, re-photographing and photo editing. We do it to make the food look as good as possible. We mean to be inspiring and appealing but sometimes it can be just plain intimidating! In real life food doesn’t look like that all the time.
I make ugly inedible fails. I bake things that are pretty much there but not the way I’d like them. I try to cut corners and suffer for it. I make things that look great, and I get excited and then cut into them to find they aren’t cooked properly and it’s too late to fix them. I’ve cried over things that don’t turn out. I’ve thrown pots at the wall in frustration. This sh*t is totally normal. Except for the pot-throwing part. You probably shouldn’t do that…
I believe there is an amazing baker inside everyone – it’s just a deep breath and a bit of practice away. Here are my 5 top tips for approaching baking feeling confident and in control:
- Prepare – read the recipe, check you have the ingredients and make sure you have the time to complete the recipe without feeling rushed. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting halfway through a recipe to find you don’t have a key ingredient or piece of equipment.
- Break it down – sometimes recipes can seem long and intimidating as a whole, but they are usually made up of a series of things that you already know how to do. When you read through the recipe identify each step and then work through them. This goes hand in hand with tip #1 – when you’re prepared you can easily move from one part of the recipe to another.
- Practice – just keep baking. The more you do it the better you will get. The more you learn, the more confident you will feel. You will be able to approach recipes and recognise techniques, and know from experience that you can get a great result. it took me nearly 15 years to make good scones because I just avoided them for most of that time. After I decided to just keep making them until I got it right it didn’t take long at all!
- Buy an electronic scale and use it – this is the #1 technical tip out there. If I could march every reader to a store and stand over them until they bought a scale I would do it. Accuracy is king in baking and weighing your ingredients is the fastest way to improve your results. Confusing failures where you follow the recipe exactly but it doesn’t turn out because we scoop flour differently will be a thing of the past.
- Own the fails – so it didn’t turn out, why? Go back over the recipe and see if you can find where it went wrong. This isn’t about finding a specific reason to blame yourself – it’s about learning for next time. There is a lot of science in baking and as you practice you will start to recognise the cause and effect of ingredients and techniques and it will help you work out why something turned out the way it did. Remember you can always ask me for help or advice – I love to help! Jump in the comments of the recipe and let me know what happened. That way your experience can help other readers too.
Please please please keep baking! It’s so rewarding to make things – especially delicious sugary things. You can do it, I know you can. I’d love to see the things you make – just snap a pic and tag it with #thewinsomebaker on Twitter or Instagram! In exchange I will stop destroying the evidence and share some of the things that I make that don’t work out so well – look out for #bakefail coming soon!
