Category: Blog

I love following the Gods of Cookery and getting great inspiration from their books and TV shows. However, have you ever noticed that, whether it is Nigella, Delia, Hugh or any of our many other heroes, they seem to have one thing in common: everything always goes to plan? It’s a far cry from my daily experience. Don’t get me wrong – I can produce some fairly decent meals, but every once in a while I encounter a kitchen disaster.

Pastry and baking is a case in point. At one time in my development it was always touch and go whether the amazing creation I had slaved over would leave the dish in one piece, after emerging from the oven. I made the mistake of believing the manufacturer’s claim that came with the dish – we clearly had different ideas of what was meant by the term ‘non-stick’.

I thought I had cracked it when I invested in what was promoted as a state of the art tray, using technology developed by astronauts as part of the space programme. My disappointment was obvious, however, when it became clear that significant parts of the underside of my cake had become welded to the tray. A chisel would have been a more appropriate serving utensil than a cake slice.

Perhaps I should have been more sceptical about that claim. Haven’t they got any work to get on with at the Space Station? Aren’t they supposed to be analysing rock samples, or out fixing satellites or something? What were they doing – knocking up a nice Victoria Sponge? Was it somebody’s birthday?

I soon put in place a workaround for my next bake, involving a cut and paste exercise. I don’t mean that in the IT sense, it was a literal cut and paste using scissors and greaseproof paper. I smeared fairly cheap margarine over the base and sides of the tray, then measured and cut a strip of paper the right width and length to cover the base and two facing sides. The bit left over was then already the right width to cut two ribbons to stick to the two remaining sides. Hey presto, a truly non-stick traybake dish.

If this sounds like some kind of kitchen origami exercise, that’s because it’s exactly what it was. I still use this as a workaround – it gives me the confidence to proceed with making my cake mixture in the knowledge that nothing else can surely go wrong. Can it?

The moral is not to be deterred when things go wrong – it happens to all of us. Cue the next track for the ADK Playlist, channelling the wise words of Elvis Costello…