Here’s a confession: baking sweet goods isn’t my biggest forte. Certainly it’s the most basic domestic art yet for the lack of interest, I never gave much thought in mastering it. I’d tried a few cakes in the past and most of them, saved for the pineapple carrot cake I made for my own birthday years ago, turned out either soggy or burnt. But baking, I believe, is a lot like writing. It takes a lot of, as what Anne Lamott would call “shitty first drafts,” rewrites (or re-bakes, in this case) and a ginormous amount of time in perfecting just a handful of sugar biscuits or jam tarts.
But perseverance is a must in life so with gusto, N and I decided to challenge each other to an amateur bake-off in our teensy-weensy kitchen. In celebration of Eid, the thought of having homespun baked treats seemed timely. We could think of no better way than to spend the holidays enjoying the fruits of our labor. Since this was our first attempt in baking cookies, we swapped the more intricate Malaysian heirlooms like kuih karas or batang buruk for something simpler from this cookbook. N picked peanut butter cookies while I settled for something nostalgic. Something that my sister used to bake at home--the apple muesli rock cakes (the book promised that even “younger members of the family” could simply master them so instant brownie point, ha!).
We made our own rules which included baking in solitary. No peeping or anything of that sort during the making until the batter was done. Our goal was to see who, among the two of us, bakes the best first-time cookies. N kickstarted the ‘competition’ and spent his Sunday afternoon sifting flour and mixing the dough. My turn came but I was nervous; baking cookies made me uncertain! I had the entire afternoon in the middle of the week only to find the flour, sugar, muesli and apples staring at me quietly from their bowls on the countertop. “So this bird thinks she can bake, eh?” they seemed to mock. Funny how they pulled a slight Cockney accent all the same.
So none to my surprise, I made several blunders along the way. I’d forsaken the baking paper and the batter contained barely enough flour to cover the amount of apples and crumbly muesli. Since it was Ramadan, neither of us could taste nor lick the batter off the spoon (imagine the temptation!). The oven was another story. We own a beat-up old one that’s the size of a shoebox; we couldn’t even fit a whole chicken in it to save our lives. N and I could only bake half a dozen cookies and rock cakes at one go. So we spent our baking session just waiting for the oven to go TING! before we could on to another small batch of cookies.
But the whole process, I dare say, was therapeutic almost. We could smell the saccharine sweetness of our cookies wafting in the air; all that thick, buttery scent swirling in with the aroma of ground cinnamon. Heavenly, just heavenly. Sure, we had to wait for long hours but it was worthwhile. Spending one day with all those smells lingering is a treat on its own. Nothing like an afternoon of turning your apartment into a small-time bakery. I also learnt a thing or two about the two of us. N is the sort who listens to his instincts whenever he’s in the kitchen. I’m less intuitive and prefer to take the scientific route by following the timer or the exact measurements as prescribed by the cookbook. Well, they do say opposites attract…
The verdict? N won by a mile. His peanut butter cookies turned out crunchy to the bite with the perfect hint of nuttiness (I’d chalk it down to beginner’s luck, thank you very much). Mine tasted just as it should, moist and extremely fruity with those tiny diced apples coated with cinnamon, but they were slightly underbaked with over-browned bottoms. Tough cookies, much?
The less-than-perfect outcome broke my heart (especially when the recipe assured that even kids could make them!) but then I came to understand my mistakes. Perhaps there will be another time when my luck with the sweet stuff would upturn. After all, life is a test kitchen and the baker in us should never give up. All it takes is possibly a few more attempts. And in between bites of my rock cakes, N said, “You gotta bake with your heart…so follow it.”
Touche, hubby, touché.
