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HUMOR
Stephen King On Baking: A Memoir Of The Craft
Every hero must wash their hands at the start of their journey
Leave the kitchen without the recipe. Tail the first baker you see. Come back to the kitchen and bake the cake this baker would.
Start as close as you can to the end. Dump all the ingredients in a Bundt tin and shove into an oven at 375F. Then work your way back to the beginning. Pull out the tin and start mixing up the ingredients with your giant KitchenAid mixer. Do you see how this makes the cake much more exciting? Now experiment. What if you had started with a tube pan?
Provide colorful details and make everything come alive. Is the olive oil extroverted? Is the sugar demure? Is the flour Sir Lancelot’s? Is your hair still a rat’s nest? Did some of it fall into the batter?
Amp up the conflict. Run out of sugar. Drop the eggs and step on the yolks. Blow the oven up into smithereens. Find weevils in your flour. Now show us how you overcome all these obstacles to bake your cake. Please don’t tell.
Find the emotional center of your key players. Why must the flour always dominate every cake? Incorporate the point of view of the spatula. Does it resent the KitchenAid’s power moves? Ponder the indentured servitude of the oven…
