If you're trying to create a company, it's like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.
It's always nice to have more than just two hands if you're making cakes.
Baking is like washing--the results are equally temporary.
You must pre-bake the bottom crust of a custard pie, but this is a tricky step in the pie-making process. Without the presence of filling the crust can slump down into the plate as it bakes, necessitating pie weights to help keep its shape. Then, once you remove the weights to blind bake the crust, the bottom puffs.
There are stages in bread-making quite similar to the stages of writing. You begin with something shapeless, which sticks to your fingers, a kind of paste. Gradually that paste becomes more and more firm. Then there comes a point when it turns rubbery. Finally, you sense that the yeast has begun to do its work: the dough is alive. Then all you have to do is let it rest. But in the case of a book the work may take ten years.
I'm not heavily into baking.
This flour of wifly patience.
You know, really - actually, it's funny because it's a sore spot with me because I have all these recipes that, you know, you have to measure things out and put them in. And then you bake it and it becomes this thing. And it's not a recipe.
Pate a choux is a mixture of simple ingredients - flour, water, milk, eggs - but the proper technique is essential. Unlike other doughs, the pastry is pre-cooked on the stovetop before being enriched with eggs, piped, and baked.
Most recently, I learned another hobby: baking. It's so much fun to mix all the ingredients and to see the cake come out nice. It's so rewarding when the cake comes out great and tastes great.
There's a certain kind of dark-crusted sourdough bread I'm incapable of resisting. A sixth sense alerts me anytime I veer within a three-block radius of a bakery offering tangy country loaves with mahogany crusts. Without fail, I'll make my way inside and buy one, even if there's already half a loaf growing stale on my countertop.
Baking is both an art and a science.
I am going to learn to make bread tomorrow. So if you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, saleratus, etc., with a deal of grace. I advise you if you dont know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.
Ye gods! But you're not standing around holding it by the hand all this time. No. [...] [T]he dough takes care of itself. [...] While you cannot speed up the process, you can slow it down at any point by setting the dough in a cooler place [...] then continue where you left off, when you are ready to do so. In other words, you are the boss of that dough.
Baking happens with ingredients that last for months and come to life inside a warm oven. Baking is slow and leisurely.
I put the guitar back in the case. I can't even look at it anymore. Instead, I want to make brownies. I want an end result there's a recipe for. I want to combine eggs and water and oil and chocolate and flour and sugar and vanilla and get something fulfilling.
You want to have a good cake? Get two engineers to build it.
Twin loaves of bread have just been born into the world under my auspices. Fine children, the image of their mother. And here, my dear friend, is the glory.
I'm not a baker, and I don't know anything about baking, and I don't claim to.
You're like a cake when you're young. You can't rush it or it will fall, or just turn out wrong. Rising takes patience, and heat.
