bluelightsix:

haleysiler:

“I like cooking, and I’m decent at it, mostly because it’s less about following directions and more about having a sort of loose idea of what things go together, how long they take to cook, and what they look like when they’re done. I dislike cookbooks and regard recipes as suggestions, not rules.”

I like baking for the reasons the author (and my boyfriend) doesn’t.  It’s rules and science.  You put several very different things together and through blending and heat they become something new and better.  When cooking I usually struggle to understand how adding x salt or y vegetable will actually make things taste.  I struggle to modify recipes on my own.  If I don’t like it I just assume I never will and don’t try recreating and adjusting.

Also, in baking, there’s often a step where they tell you to cream together the butter and sugar.  If you don’t sneak a taste of just this then you need to reassess your life.

Deep down, at heart, I’m a baker as well.  Not that I don’t love cooking (because I do, deeply.  And I live by myself so I have to do an equal amount of both…), but I love the magic of baking.  You put together ingredients that WILL DO certain tasks (eggs bind, baking powders and sodas rise, honeys moisten, flours make things puffy and delicious) and it creates this, in some cases, fairly unappetizing mass, and then you put it in the oven and whammo.  Raw pie dough: blergh.  Baked pie dough: nirvana. 

Baking’s also more risky.  With cooking you can add as you go, change things, sample things as they cook and (sometimes) avert disasters.  With baking, once it’s in the oven, it’s a foregone conclusion.  You just have to wait and hope you’ve done everything right until you get to open the oven (and can we talk about that moment, when you open the oven door and the smells just blow you backwards?  I love that moment.  As long as the smells are, you know, good ones) and see what the heat has made. 

I’m also still riding the success of my apple pie from this weekend, so, yeah.  Baking!  Fuck yeah!

i love it when my best friends from college wax poetic about baking on tumblr.

(via bluelightseven)