renewals

a wednesday wander

A Wednesday wander on a Thursday? I’m sure it’s Wednesday somewhere. I was stuck in the countryside, at an establishment where in spite of all information to the contrary, there was no internet service. Oh well.

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At the beginning of the summer, I decided to renew my pastry license, so I made a cake. It was my favorite kind of cake, a simple butter cake with buttercream, and when I was teaching myself to bake, these were some of the first recipes I learned. I hadn’t made butter cake or buttercream in probably 4 or 5 years, because there’s a formality to these that our lives haven’t called for. Making one of these cakes is like choosing to dress for dinner – a deliberate investment in joy. 

We think of baking as a skill, but it’s actually a whole constellation of them, and not all of them are physical and acquired through muscle memory. Thanks to the stand mixer, a lot of pastry work is actually about organization and timing and a sense for when something is done. A lot more of it is about rituals of care, like remembering to check if your sheet pans are flat enough. Your body can’t remember these things for your mind. And cake making is specific enough that all the sponge cakes and custards and kueh I’ve made in the intervening years haven’t helped a whit. 

The cake was a necessary and painful exercise. It was entirely edible, but it also made it clear that the years of not baking had cost something. It wasn’t simply forgetting, since the recipes remain where they were and paper doesn’t forget. I even remembered the parts that can’t be written down, like what it means for butter to be creamy, and what it looks like when you’ve properly integrated the eggs. What I lost wasn’t knowledge, but the feeling of knowing. 

This feeling that you can trust yourself might be the most important thing in cooking, and probably matters more to the cook than to the eater. Yes, there’s a difference between a perfectly mixed cake and one that’s almost perfectly mixed, and you can find it if you look hard enough. But nothing can mediate between you and your senses, or you and your memory, and so much of the joy in cooking rests in that span of certainty.