We all know food is essential to sustaining life, but I also think it sustains us in other ways. Food is known to evoke memories, and just the thought of certain dishes could flood us with emotion. For me that memory is Great Aunt Mary Katherine’s Oatmeal Cookies, which I associate with warm fuzzy Christmases. For some, certain foods could remind us of harsher times like living on ramen noodles to get us through college.
Food speaks to all of us. It is such a universal language that I decided to use it to communicate something at work. Well, also because I’m a Southern storyteller. Why explain something in plain terms when you can make a meal of it?
My cake theory goes like this:
My boss at the day job kept asking me to do things for which I had no particular skill. Now that doesn’t mean I had no skill, but these are things that usually involved the website or things I was not as familiar with. Or, they involved design, which I’m terrible at. I can use a thousand words and describe exactly what something should look like and why it should look like that, but when it comes to actually putting a line or a color on something, I struggle.
So my amateur attempts at design or the web programming language known as HTML turned out pretty pathetic. The boss was frustrated. I was frustrated. And worse, the project fell further and further behind until one day I put down my foot with the cake theory.
Boss man, I have spent a lifetime learning how to bake – teaching myself how to bake. Baking is different from cooking. If you are stirring up a batch of something such as soup, it can be tasted and altered for flavor – a little pinch of this; a dash of that – until it is yummy and suits your liking. The same does not apply with baking.
Baking requires precision, measuring and exactness to do it well. Even if you follow directions to the letter, your cake will not always turn out. At this moment, I have the equipment, the ingredients and the knowledge to walk into my kitchen and bake a cake. In just an hour, I can whip up a gorgeous cake.
Since I’ve studied the science of baking, I know that one has to have all the ingredients at room temperature. I know the trick of flouring dried fruits to keep them from sinking to the bottom of baked goods. I have an oven temperature gauge because I know that shortbread will spread if the oven is too hot. I know this stuff because I have practiced, failed, practiced more, talked with expert bakers and watched every episode of Great British Baking Show.
Now, if I sent you, Boss man, into your kitchen and asked you to bake a cake, what would happen? Do you even have cake tins, or would you have to spend part of your hour buying them? Do you know what size they are? Do you know what size you need? Do you know the creaming method and the exact color and consistency of properly creamed butter and sugar? Even with a boxed cake mix, I doubt you could make a decent cake.
So the point of this story is everyone has skills, but no one has all the skills. If you are not a baker, why muddle through a sad old cake, when you can get an expert to make you a fabulous cake? And make you a fabulous cake in half the time.
Boss man said, “Go get a web developer.” Food analogy for the win!
