This morning I made a cake and a batch of cookies. Both
for the first time. I’d been thinking about the cake for a while, figuring out
how to make it, and it was the only thing I’d planned to bake today. The cookies
were a last minute add-on, a request from my son who needs a baked good (“with
chocolate, please”) to take to his weekly Game Night with “the boys.” Inexplicably,
I decided to make black and white cookies, which I’ve wanted to try for years.
I love the idea of the black and white cookie (the cookies themselves have a
cake-like quality) and of course the symmetry and symbolism is very appealing.
All good, right? Well, it would have been if I hadn’t been making a cake using my own recipe at the same time.
It took a long time and many, many cakes for me to
go off-book and create my own recipes. As confident as I am in my ability to
design or imagine a cake, I am timid and nervous when it comes to tweaking
recipes I’ve found that I like. My grandmother was a terrific baker but a
terrible teacher. Her breads and buns were to die for, but she made them using
handfuls of flour, pinches of yeast, and straight pours of milk without any
measurement whatsoever. “This much,”she’d say, tossing in sugar and raisins
willy-nilly. I might have learned from her if I’d spent more time watching her,
but for almost my entire life we lived on separate and far removed continents. But
the longer I bake the more intuitive I become with ingredients. Ultimately, all
recipes are variations on the same theme; the properties of baking powder,
flour, fat, and sugar remain relatively constant. A sour cream coffee cake has
almost the same ingredients whether it comes from Martha Stewart or the side of
a Clabber Girl tin.
It’s much the same with writing. There isn’t a plot
that hasn’t been thought of already. One of the reasons I enjoy writing memoir
(and, conversely, why I stress about writing fiction) is that I know nobody
else has lived exactly my life and so at least my story has some element of
originality. Even then, though, there are always so many similarities in even
the most personal of stories, never mind a suspense thriller. Before I begin a
new book (or even an outline of one), I research how many others are out there
with the same plot or idea. There are always so many. But of course, I can’t
limit myself with this. If I did I’d never write anything. In the end it’s what
you do with the tale as old as time that matters—that makes a book or a cake
unique. I was flipping through the channels the other night and saw a snippet
of an interview with Emmylou Harris (who I love). She was talking about forming
an identity as an artist and said that in the beginning you inevitably borrow
from everyone you think is great and try to emulate that greatness. Where you
fall short is where you develop your own
style. “I read something once,” she said, “that style is a product of your limitations.”
True enough.
When I first started adding extra spice or swapping
one essence for another in my cakes, it gave me a little thrill but still felt
safe as I was staying inside the boundaries set by the recipe. Changing
ingredients was a different story entirely. But this morning, that is exactly
what I did. I wanted to make a saffron cake (more on this adventure and why I
embarked on it in a post to come) but I’ve never seen a recipe for one. I knew
I needed to dissolve the saffron in milk to bring out the color and flavor but
I also wanted a complimentary flavor to set it off in the cake. I knew I couldn’t
make a true sponge because I don’t bake with eggs, but I felt like the cake
needed to be very moist. And I wanted—no, needed—to
use currants. It turned out this was
enough to put together a recipe. And though it didn’t bake up exactly as I’d imagined, it actually
looks (and tastes) great. The not exactly as I planned it part might have made
me substantially more anxious (I mean, it’s not that anyone’s judging me, but I
really hate failing and hate wasting ingredients, especially something as
pricey as saffron) had I not been making black and white cookies
from a Martha Stewart recipe. Yes, Martha Stewart, about whom I used to dream
regularly (in the dreams she would show me how to do things like weave baskets)—but
that too is another story—and whose recipes have driven me to throw things against
walls and curse in languages I didn’t even think I knew.
But I digress.
The cookies came out
well. Well enough. They aren’t perfectly round, but, okay, next time. The
icings went on all right too. But then I looked at them and thought…I bet I
could make these more interesting. So I went off-book and put my own spin on
the things. Next time they’ll be even better.  |
| Black and White and Black and White Cookies |
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