I sometimes suffer from recipe perfectionism: the desire for the recipe to turn out perfectly the first time, regardless of my familiarity with it. We all want our cakes, cupcakes, fudge, and other treats to taste great, and if you're blogging about it, or taking them to a dinner party, there is an added pressure for them to look great too. I'm starting to re-frame how I see my baking, so instead of seeing a recipe as the 'perfect' finished product, I'm trying to appreciate that most times baking is an experiment, and sometimes shit doesn't work out. I know part of my perfectionism is that I spent money on ingredients and I don't want to waste them, but I'm trying to see that money as an investment in bettering my baking skills. Plus even when baking goes horribly wrong, it still tends to taste pretty good. Someone in this house will eat it!
Earlier this summer I made some
Canada Day cupcakes. They tasted great and actually looked pretty great in photos (I took this one when they were cold; they looked so much better cold), but the red icing was a pain to make and work with.
I had never made a dark icing before, and my Google searching led me to believe it was going to be hard. Knowing it would be hard helped me be less disappointed when I ran into trouble. My previous experience working with gel colours had all been easy, simply adding a tiny amount usually did the trick. Red was a whole other thing.
In my red icing research, I came across two tips that were really helpful. First, I bought
no taste Red, as many baking forums suggested I would use a lot of the gel colour (possibly the whole jar) and using regular red would make the icing taste gross. The other tip I followed was to leave the icing overnight in the fridge so the red colour could darken.
While making the icing, things started to go awry, and I realized there were some tips I missed. The red colour separated while I was mixing it, giving it a white speckled look.
I later learned that dark colours have a tendency to do that, and can be avoided by keeping your icing thick. Not only was my icing thin and separating, but it was also soft (it looked like it wouldn't ice properly), and I learned that on particularly humid days (which it was)
adding shortening instead of butter helps to avoid this. You also don't want to beat it too much (I definitely beat it too much!). But now I know for next time.
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| It didn't photograph clearly, but there are lines of white separating from red |
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| It looked better after darkening in the fridge |
I also learned about baking photography and how room temperture icing doesn't look as good as refrigerated icing. I did a whole photo shoot with room temp, and then did it all over again because it just looked so much better cold.
Do you ever expect yourself to do things perfectly the first time? How does it work out? I'm trying to remember to focus on the journey and not worry so much about the outcome.
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