Читать книгу Sugar High - Nicole Hampton - Страница 11

Baking has always been a part of my life. I started baking with my mom at a really young age, before I could even reach the counter. We baked cookies from scratch, and sometimes pulled out my grandma’s recipe for peanut brittle, but otherwise we used a lot of boxed mixes. (I’ll admit, to this day, sometimes I just crave a good ol’ reliable box-mix cake.)

As I grew up, I started to experiment more with from-scratch baking, and you probably know how that went. I’ve lived at a high altitude for most of my life, and I’ve had a shocking number of failures in the kitchen.

When I first started blogging, I lived down near sea level in Boston, but I had an apartment-sized oven, which was a whole new struggle. When I moved in, I didn’t even know that apartment-sized ovens were a thing. After finally building a collection of bakeware that actually fit in my oven, it was about time to move back home to the original struggle of baking at high altitude.

Cupcakes were my first stop. Listen, there are few things more disappointing than driving to the grocery store, buying all the stuff, and spending huge amounts of time measuring and mixing just to pull sunken, dense, eggy messes from the oven. For the longest time, I couldn’t get the flavors right and I couldn’t get the texture right. Even after all my experimenting, I still think that homemade cakes are one of the hardest things to make at altitude.

As hard as normal cakes are, for some reason chocolate cakes are in a whole other

league. Chocolate cake batter always looks so luscious and silky, and I would think, “Yes, this is the one. It’s gonna be perfect.” Then I’d pull it out of the oven thirty minutes later to find that the middle had collapsed nearly all the way to the bottom of the cake pan, and that the rest was full of giant, gaping air pockets.

It’s just a bummer that baking at altitude requires so much trial and error. You put something in the oven, tasting great and looking right, and then your oven (and mine too) pulls some kind of mean magic trick in there. The good news is that baking is a science, and high-altitude baking has solutions. I’m here to show them to you.

Don’t get me wrong—I still burn Pop-Tarts® in the toaster oven at work, and I still have to fan smoke out of my kitchen with a dishtowel on occasion. But I do have some really reliable recipes that have had my back when I need to make a cake in a rush, or when I need to whip up a pie for a last-minute party.

Nowadays, it makes me feel more confident in the kitchen knowing that I can pull out my recipe box and choose any cake, bread, pie, or bar and it’ll work. No mean tricks from the oven! Baking is way more fun when it actually turns out beautifully in the end.

I hope that, through this book, you can find enjoyment in baking again, and that you, too, can have a secret stash of recipes that just do their thing in the oven and make you look good! Having a kitchen full of yummy treats ain’t so bad either.

BAKING THROUGH DOUGH EYES

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