Adventures in Baking

Full disclosure: I'm not much of a baker. For most of my life, I was also not much of a cook. I remember one summer evening in college I attempted to sauté some spinach for Mark and I and thought it wise to add salt, pepper, garlic (should've stopped there...), cajun seasoning, soy sauce, honey, paprika, and pretty much anything else I could find on the spice rack. Mark, my boyfriend at the time, managed to get down a couple bites with a forced smile before we threw it out and turned our attention to the frozen ravioli we had boiled. Successfully.

My culinary education took place later, during stints abroad. Living in Tübingen and Lannion and cooking with international roommates and friends expanded my repertoire, but more importantly it got me to start viewing cooking as fun.

But not baking. Baking is hard. You need to be precise with measurements. You need to follow the recipe exactly. And you need to use flour which I always manage to get all over the kitchen and all over myself.

Despite this, I decided to give baking another go for a potluck I hosted last night with a recipe I've been eying for weeks: Nutella Pound Cake. I'm the type of person who eats Nutella straight from the jar by the spoonful so my excitement trumped any residual fear of flour.

My first challenge was to convert all the American measurements into grams. Apparently, a cup of flour and a cup of sugar do not convert into the same amount of grams. My sister, superior in all things culinary, explained that this is a volume vs. weight issue and that all real bakers measure in weight. Well to use weight, I needed a scale. So I went upstairs to my 80 year old neighbor and asked if I could borrow hers which she graciously handed over:

This scale is older than I am:

The second challenge was getting the stupid cake out of the pans. I don't really want to go into that because I lost a whole layer of delicious carmelized nutella in the first attempt and it's too painful to discuss.

The verdict: It was delicious, but I won't be baking anything else for awhile. More importantly, the potluck was a big success. Though there were two rooms available all 15 of us ended up eating in the same room in a big circle, how cute! Here are pictures of the apartment all ready for people to arrive and then during the party:

Blurry but cute one of Gio, Kel, and I: