Baking Blogfest

I'm taking part in Charity Bradford's Baking Blogfest. Since my MC in THE SHADOW SCRIBE is a recipe developer (and so am I - see this post on how recipe development works), this is right up my alley. Here's a scene where Lara is working on a project, preparing recipes and photographs to appear on the back of a cake mix package.

     Once again talking to myself, I brainstormed a few quick ideas. “One stir-in recipe…maybe almonds and coconut. Bar cookies…a variation on millionaire’s shortbread? Something healthy, maybe with fruit?”
     After translating the ideas into rough recipes, I gathered the ingredients for the first recipe and turned on the voice recognition software, setting the laptop off to the side of the work area where it wouldn’t be splashed by anything.
     “One box cake mix, a half-cup chopped toasted almonds, a half-cup shredded coconut, two tablespoons vegetable oil, a quarter-cup water...”
     “You say something, love?”
     “Oh!” I jumped a foot and splashed water down my front. My lack of sleep made me very twitchy. The plumber stood in the doorway.
     “No, sorry, I was working,” I explained, gesturing at the laptop.
     “Right, sorry about that,” he said and walked off toward the front door, avoiding Mike coming in with the wheelbarrow. I closed the door and then went over to the laptop to delete the last exchange from the screen.
     Four hours later, the smell of chocolate filled the kitchen and dirty bowls and desserts of varying degrees of edibility covered the counters. The coconut almond cake was delicious, the bar cookies tasty but too sticky, and the so-called healthy recipe with raisins and bran cereal was disgusting. Recipe development was not a job with immediate gratification. Some projects – like this one – took me five, ten, even twenty tries to get the recipe perfect. The bedroom, my makeshift studio for the day, was in an even worse state. Plates of mauled and mangled food were everywhere, the victims of my attempts for visual culinary perfection. My hero – the food actually photographed – still sat beneath the lights getting dry and stale, looking less than appetizing.

I've done recipe development for baking and for culinary applications, but my true love is baking. When I was in culinary school, our instructor said to the class on the first day, "Some of you are chefs and some of you are bakers. Here, you will do both, but you will find you are drawn to one side or another." And I found that to be true, both for myself and the other students in my class. Why the difference, you might ask?

Cooking is on the fly, meaning that for the most part, you can change and adapt as you go on. You taste, you adjust, you immediately taste again. Many chefs don't use recipes, but go by instinct and feel. Or they start with a recipe and immediately change course to make it even better.

Baking is precision. Consider this: cookies, cakes, and pastries are all made from the same basic ingredients. Flour, sugar, butter, eggs, raising agents. But you change the proportions and you get a totally different result. If you don't balance your recipe perfectly, you do not get the results you expect. And you usually have to wait for some time to find that out (an hour or so for it to bake).

UH-OH! Analogy alert! You could compare this to the difference between pantsers and plotters, right?

Which are you -- a baker or a chef?

Cooking up more strange stuff

As I mentioned last week, my former job was a recipe developer.  I was given a product and had to use it as an ingredient in a recipe, which might be printed on the back of the packaging or perhaps put on a website for users to access. For three years, I worked for a company that made gravy, sauce, and bakery mixes. After a while, you use up the run-of-the-mill recipe ideas for beef gravy or pancake mix and start to get a little creative (read: weird).

Here is a list of the some of the strange recipes I made:

• Rootbeer Float Pancakes: I had to come up with 15 pancake recipes in one week. (And we're not talking about "Add 1 cup blueberries.") I used rootbeer instead of milk to make the pancakes. They tasted a little strange with maple syrup, but they very tasty with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
• Instant Stuffing Sauce: A restaurant chain wanted a mix they could combine with water and pour over day-old biscuits to make stuffing. It smelled just like Stove-Top , but was kind of thick and sticky so that it didn't make the biscuits soggy.
• Mole Sauce: Mole (pronounced Mow - lay) is a wonderful Mexican sauce made from roasted chilis, corn tortillas, almonds and chocolate. Somehow, I managed to turn Beef Gravy mix into a passable mole (OK, not passable here in San Antonio, but they accepted up north just fine). This one took me about twelve attempts to get it right. 
• Chocolate Cream Pie: I made chocolate pudding out of Biscuit Gravy. This is not quite as weird as it seems when you realize that biscuit gravy is basically flour, corn starch and milk (no seasonings), which are the same main ingredients as pudding. I made up the hot gravy and stirred in sugar and chocolate chips. When the chocolate was melted, I poured it in a prebake pie shell and topped it with whipped cream. OK, yeah, that is pretty weird.

So there you have it: culinary strangeness.

If you missed it, go check out my last post on recipe development as a writing analogy for a little contest. Comment here or at that post and there might be a cup of coffee in it for you (I'm giving away a $5 Starbucks gift card -- sorry, I'm cheap these days as I am no longer employed as a recipe developer!).

Cooking up another writing analogy

Writers love analogies. And we really love analogies about writing. Some days, it seems like every other blog post out there ends with a comparison of how the day's topic compares to the writing process. I did one on shoes not too long ago.

In my past life (meaning the era before I chucked my career to write full time) I was a recipe developer, working in the test kitchen of a food manufacturer. This also happens to be the job of Lara, my MC in THE SHADOW SCRIBE. As I was revising, I came upon this passage, something Lara says while working:

Recipe development is not a job with immediate gratification. Some projects – like this one – take me five, ten, even twenty tries to get the recipe perfect.

So of course, that got the analogy juices flowing. Let me tell you how recipe development works:

You start with an ingredient (usually a product made by said company). And then you come up with a target recipe. You write out a version of the recipe using the necessary ingredient and then you make the recipe. And you taste it. And you change a few ingredients. And then you make it again. And adjust a few more things. And then you make it again. And taste it again.

By now, you are getting tired of the taste and you are losing your objectivity. So you have a few other people taste it. They give you their opinions; some think it needs more salt, some think it needs less. So you change it again. And you taste it again. You start to think you never want to taste that recipe ever again. But you must, because it is your job, you've worked hard on it, and you are a professional. You remake and retaste a few more times until you think it is perfect.

When you are confident it is finished, you serve it up to the VIPs (usually sales and marketing types). Sometimes they say it isn't quite what they are after (at which point you go back and rework and retaste a few more times). And sometimes, their eyes glaze over, they make yummy noises, and they eat the whole thing. Score.

I'm not going to draw the writing/editing analogy for you -- you are a bright group and I'm sure you'll figure it out.

So that is my "_______ is like writing" analogy.

Let's have a contest (my first ever)! In the comment section, give me your best/most obscure/most ridiculous "_____ is like writing" analogy. If you've already posted an analogy on your own blog, link to it. If you've seen someone else with a great analogy, link to that. If you don't have an analogy, comment anyway. I get lonely over here sometimes.

For anyone who comments or links, I'll throw your name in a hat for a $5 gift card for Starbucks (yeah, it's a small prize but, heck, every writer could use coffee, tea or a muffin). There's an extra entry for anyone who makes a "Writing is like Starbucks" analogy or who mentions this contest on their blog. You've got until Thursday, April 29 to enter.

Come on... you're a writer! I know you've got an analogy floating around there somewhere!