My Stint with Baking

Ever since Covid, and the whole baking saga all over the internet, I have been itching to try my hands at them. I have always been a fan of any sort of pastries / baked goods and seeing all the baking videos and pictures of cakes and biscuits, and what not, had me drooling. So, when our good old microwave oven broke down, I convinced the husband man that to get a convection oven to satisfy my baking thirst. Poor fellow fell for my words and tada, a convection oven comes home. Well, this was in 2020. But the moment the oven came, my interest waned off and I kept procrastinating baking. Had tried a banana cake and some sweet-bread once, both of which turned out very okay-ish, causing my interest vanishing off into thin air - poof! I decided that baking wasn’t going to be my cup of tea and stopped dreaming about baking my own cake. 

Fast forward to 2025. As it always happens (is it only me?), I taste some biscuits baked my cousin, and suddenly all my interest (the one that I considered vanished but had apparently been only bottled up) is out all over again. I knew my brain was tricking me again and deliberately procrastinate this time as well. I get the recipe from my cousin, and read it a hundred times, watch another fifty videos in YouTube, think of all the various substitutes I can use instead of the actual ingredients mentioned in the recipe. I even end buying a couple of ingredients, but I’m still a bit skeptical about taking that plunge of actually doing the baking. 

After about a week of staring at the purchased ingredients I decide to do it over the last weekend. Why does baking need so much of crockeries and utensils? A whole set of measuring cups, spatulas, whiskers, sieve, bowls, rolling pins - man, how many stuff to wash. As soon as I started the task, my mind started calculating the amount of time it’d take to wash and clean the powdery mess I’d create all over the floor. But then, I had already started, so I decided to complete it in peace.

I begin by whisking the butter in a bowl. In another bowl (see, already 3 utensils), I sieve in some flour, milk powder, salt and baking soda. Then I combine the ingredients of both the bowl into one, and go for the star ingredient of the dish. Sugar. Now, this is where I was completely flabbergasted - for approximately, 2 cups of flour and butter, I use one full cup of sugar. I know, sweets/biscuits are supposed to have sugar, but seeing the size of my dough and the quantity of sugar I was going to add into it, caught me quite off guard. I go ahead, and mix it all together. Trying to follow the recipe instructions into the T, I gently keep kneading it, but the dough refused to fully bind. So, resorted to some jugaad by adding a few drops of milk to help with binding. I guess it worked, because the dough binded after that - I still wasn’t sure what this would mean / cause to the final product. And next, I commit the biggest mistake of tasting the dough. Oh god, it felt a little too salty and way too sugary. By this time, I had lost all my hopes on how the final product would turnout and started assessing the amount of money I’d wasted on this, and thought I should have left these to experts and simply enjoyed the biscuits straight out of the packets or from bakers. Attempting to make my own biscuit was going to be only a cost in my books, with nil return / revenue. 

With no hopes whatsoever, I pulled out the dough into small balls, and pressed them down into circular shapes. Because I had zero hopes, I didn’t even bother to shape them uniformly and ended up making them in various sizes and thicknesses. The first batch went into the oven. Slowly they started turning golden brown, and rising up. That felt really good to watch, but I was still worried about the taste. In about 10 minutes, I see the biscuits on the edge of the plate starting to burn and decided to take them off the oven. I take them out only to realise the ones in the middle haven’t completely cooked yet, while the edges of the ones in the end were starting to burn. I decided to put it back in for another 4 minutes. Once done, I took them out, and impatiently let them cool for a little while, and tasted one biscuit.

Well! Well! Well!! My efforts were not all in vain. Though the biscuits had a tinge of saltiness, the sugariness had settled well. The sugariness of the baked biscuit wasn’t as bad as the sugariness of the plain dough. But I still wasn’t convinced that people at home would eat them, and decided to take off a bunch to office to distribute and get it over with. It took me another 3 batches of baking to finish off the entire dough. I still didn’t have the patience to shape them out perfectly, so the biscuits ended up being in different sizes and thicknesses. I now had two small boxes full of my homemade biscuits, and went to bed wondering how to get them sold (a.k.a make people eat) 

The real shocker came only the next day when the boy and the husband man tasted them and told it was actually nice. Well, all that butter hadn’t given up on me and actually saved my biscuits making them melt in the mouth. The biscuits had a bite to it, but once bitten melted effortlessly - and before I knew it, one box had vanished off in a day. The aftertaste of the biscuit was its biggest highlight for me - the butteriness combined with a sweetness definitely left me weak and I ended up having a couple more than I should. They felt sinfully good. And thus, ended my baking saga.

Would I bake biscuits again? It depends on two main things. One, I need to find an alternative for sugar - the amount of sugar I put in that mixture got me super scared. Two, I need a foolproof plan to use minimal utensils or have a helping hand washing the utensils. 

That’s all for now, folks. Happy biscuiting! 

My home-made marvel, lol!