The Art of Baking Blind

by Sarah Vaughan

  Baking – and, more specifically, setting herself up as a baker in a cookery competition – is supposed to be a means of avoiding such anxieties. Of reinventing herself: acquiring a more appropriate, more maternal hobby than starving herself, exercising fanatically, or obsessing about her ageing, increasingly unattractive body. In her most lonely moments – and she has plenty of these – she imagines she is becoming the wicked queen to her daughter’s Snow White. Or a Mrs Robinson to Jake’s friends. Either way, she fears she is an embarrassment to her kids.

  And so she bakes: beating and whipping, scraping and caressing, measuring, timing, assessing. Digital scales and a sugar thermometer make her precise, though nothing compensates for her refusal to taste. Nevertheless, she is competent and assured; determined and, potentially, ruthless. She is channelling her energy into this Battenburg as if its creation is the most important thing in her world. And, for the moment, on this bleak day in early March, it is.

  * * *

  An hour later and the bake has become supremely technical. Butter icing is smeared between strips of pink and golden sponge and the pieces tessellated to create a checkerboard effect. White marzipan is rolled in an oblong and the icing-covered sponge then wrapped in this like a choice present. Five Battenburgs sit squatly, some more even than others; a couple clearly lumpy; one with irregular cuboids of sponge. Queen Victoria – for whose granddaughter the cake was invented – may not have been amused. Mrs Eaden may have been appalled. But in the competition kitchen, there is a sense of accomplishment – and relief that the job is done.

  ‘And – tools down.’ Dan’s voice – deep, mellifluous – fills the air and the contestants stop what they are doing. Five golden cakes, set on white cake stands, are carried to the display bench at the front to be cut. Vicki allows herself a small smile and tucks her hair behind her ears. Even from this distance, hers looks the clear front-runner: neat, plump, majestic. A knife plunges in and reveals perfect gold and pink squares. The epitome of kitsch, it tantalises and looks particularly good to eat.

  The judges agree.

  ‘The crumb is perfect,’ declares Harriet, a moist fragment clinging to her lipstick before her tongue swipes it away. ‘Our two winning bakers this week then – the two who must appear on YouTube – are Jennifer, for the Victoria sponge, and Vicki.’

  Vicki, receiving a verdict she has waited two decades for, cannot suppress a massive, heartfelt grin. Perfect. They think my cake is perfect. Her grin widens until she fears she looks ridiculous. But she cannot stop herself. Finally, she has the validation she needs.

  Biscuits

  A home-made biscuit is a thing of beauty. Light and ephemeral, sweet and buttery, it should melt on the tongue and leave guests pining for more.

  Our American friends may eat cookies, soft plates of dough studded with chocolate, and our young children may find these appealing. But the best of biscuits are more delicate. With an exquisitely curled brandy snap, a piped coffee kiss, a raspberry macaroon or a melting moment, the ordinary housewife can conjure up indulgence, refinement and elegance. She will delight those at her coffee mornings – and astound them with her skill.

  The rules are simple. Handle the bound dough as little as possible and be sparing with extra flour: it may stop it sticking but will make the biscuit less tender. With rolled or shaped biscuits, rest the dough in the refrigerator for a good half-hour before shaping. Chill the dough for refrigerator cookies for considerably longer. Simple flavourings work best: a little grated orange or lemon rind; ground cinnamon or ginger; ground almonds or instant coffee; vanilla essence or cocoa powder.

  Biscuits do not need to be expensive. But they do need to tantalise: stoking your appetite so that you will need to be restrained in eating just the one. Like the petits fours served in the most sophisticated French restaurants, they are entirely frivolous. And, perhaps because of this, they are all the more irresistible.

  Kathleen Eaden: The Art of Baking (1966)

  Kathleen

  She is baking, now, in her Bradley Hall kitchen: a vast, high-ceilinged room in which her cook is also working, preparing an evening meal for sixteen while she, Kathleen, bakes solely for her delight.

  Her book is going well: the biscuit section halfway complete, the words flowing freely, covering page after page of cream paper, as her delicacies crisp or turn toffeeish.

  Today, though, her notepad is in the drawer and she is making biscuits just for the hell of it. And not just any dull cookies but the most childish and evocative of biscuits – baked not to impress but to provoke a smile of utter joy. Plump, chewy and brown. Glinting with sugar. Studded with dark raisin buttons and eyes.

  She works the dough for the gingerbread men, rolling it lightly. The scent of the ginger, the mixed spice, the touch of cinnamon are perhaps unseasonal. But Susan and James, her niece and nephew, will hardly mind.

  She presses the cutters down: a mummy, a daddy, and two babies – a girl and a boy. The block of marble is soon covered with two families: her older sisters, Esme and Mary, their husbands and offspring; a single man, her roguish younger brother Charlie; her mother, Celia; and a childless couple, George and herself.

  She cuts out another man: her father, Alexander. Mr Justice Pollington. Strong, authoritative, indefatigable, dependable, who nevertheless keeled over with a massive heart attack on her seventeenth birthday leaving a hole that cannot be filled by any gingerbread shape.

  She scrunches up the dough and surveys his remaining family: extensive and ever extending; warm; inclusive; yet never quite making up for his absence, though Charlie – fifteen when Daddy died – does try. They are bossy, frequently judgemental, tolerant of George and his wealth – but never entirely accepting. By no means malleable yet soon to be transformed into pieces of gingerbread.

  And then, slowly and ever so tenderly, she presses the boy cutter into the dough once again. Another baby. She has told no one yet: not George, not her mother. But her period is late and her breasts feel different. They tingle. She has made an appointment to see her doctor. She is almost sure.

  She dithers over whether to bake the baby or to roll it back into the dough: is she tempting fate if she creates it, or if she expunges it? She has waited so long for this and she doesn’t want what happened before to happen once more.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she tells herself sharply. Stop being fanciful. You are baking; nothing else.

  But just to make sure, she creates a string of small boys and girls: sturdy, compact, and when baked, harder and stronger than their parents.

  9

  I have rarely met a man – whether a husband or a son – who is not partial to a sweet little something. A chewy macaroon, a chocolate-coated biscuit, a buttery Viennese whirl sandwiched with butter cream.

  They may proclaim to love all things savoury but that does not preclude their hankering after a titbit that is tempting and wickedly sugary.

  Vicki is in her default position: standing at her kitchen island, the surface strewn with ingredients, gazing out at her frozen world.

  Inside her Edwardian semi she is toasty. Warmth seeps through the oak floor of her retro kitchen while the red Aga expels heat with the blithe confidence of a global-warming denier. Yet the cold is insidious. Condensation clings to the French windows, numbing her fingers. A reminder of how closeted she is; how vicious the elements are.

  The big freeze continues to be unrelenting: encasing the earth with frost, punishing the few brave crocuses. People speak of it in hyperboles: ‘The most intense cold for thirty years’; ‘The most sustained cold snap for half a century.’ To the weather forecasters, thrilled at having something sensational to broadcast, there is ill-disguised glee in such extremity. To the nation as a whole, there is a peculiarly British pride in showing fortitude in the face of adversity. To Vicki, it is just bloody annoying.

  She turns to her kitchen table and the fruit of her morning’s labours: eight wire racks laden with melting moments, oatcakes, chocolate chip and hazel
nut cookies, shortbread, macaroons. Crisp round the edges, chewy in the centre, the biscuits gleam, plump with sugar and butter. She breaks a cookie in half and nibbles the sweet buttery crust oozing rich dark chocolate. Perhaps she has achieved biscuit perfection.

  She turns to smile at a photo of Kathleen Eaden, white-tacked in a prominent position on the door of a cupboard. Her head on one side, Kathleen holds a mixing bowl aloft and is stirring with a wooden spoon. You make it all look so effortless, thinks Vicki. But you clearly had drive and ambition: you weren’t just some model who took a good picture. The woman seems to smile at her, down the decades. Help me, Vicki wills her. Help me do my best. Help me to bake well enough to appear again in one of those mini films on YouTube. And help me to win the competition.

  Her eyes flit to the clock and she realises that she has been baking for over four hours. In this time Alfie has helped her, played with his train track – and been slumped in front of CBeebies for the past hour and a half.

  She knows this is bad parenting but, in her desire to work her way through five recipes, finds it easy to excuse. Greg would not be impressed. But then, as always, Greg is not around.

  She goes into the playroom and switches off the television, to instant screams from Alfie. She should have given him a five-minute warning or counted down while shaking a shaker, as she did as a teacher, but, really, he has watched too much.

  ‘I’m sorry, my boy.’ She tries to bundle him into her arms. ‘But you’ve had it on for ages. How about some lunch? You could have a warm chocolate chip cookie after your cheese on toast?’

  ‘Nooooooooooo!’

  The bellow fills the room as hunger, boredom and frustration at being ignored combust in his small body. He tosses his head in anger, writhes with surprising ferocity, and lashes out at her. She holds his legs, strokes his hair from his reddening forehead and tries to kiss away his tears of rage.

  ‘I’m sorry, my lovely,’ she soothes him. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The screams continue but are more half-hearted; the fight gone as he nestles into her breasts and inhales her unique scent of Eternity and melted butter. He begins to whimper, appeased by her touch. She loves him so much like this. When he allows himself to be pacified by her and, momentarily, is less a little boy than a baby or small toddler. When he buries himself into her as if he wants to curl up, safe inside her. Soft with exhaustion; and briefly compliant.

  Hand in hand they traipse to the kitchen where Vicki puts bread under the grill and begins to slice cheddar, cube avocado, halve cherry tomatoes. How many middle-class children are being fed this at lunchtime? she wonders. Tomatoes, cucumber, raisins, carrot sticks, bread sticks: the staple healthy snacks offered at children’s parties – and the offerings habitually swept up into black bin bags at the end, untouched.

  She would like to pretend her boy chose these over mini rolls, party rings and chocolate fingers, but, like most children, he’d prefer a bit of cake. As if to illustrate this, he is swiping a warm chocolate chip cookie from the bounty on the table and cramming chewy morsels into his mouth. Dark chocolate from a large chip oozes on to his chin and the crumb is smeared on his cheeks. He giggles and she turns.

  ‘Oh, Alfie. Not before you have something healthy. I said afterwards.’ Her tone is beseeching. But then she looks at those mischievous hazel eyes, that dimple, the look of utter delight in doing something unsanctioned but within the safe confines of his kitchen, and she relents.

  ‘My gorgeous boy. I can’t really expect you to obey me if I leave them out for you, can I?’ And she too takes a cookie, bites into its yielding centre, and shares a moment of rare complicity.

  * * *

  In her Suffolk kitchen Jenny – she has decided she is Jenny now – is also grappling with biscuits, though, really, she finds it the simplest type of baking of all. Buoyed by winning the first task of the competition, she too is optimistic. With no elimination element, she knows she cannot be knocked out but she wants to do more: she wants to excel, even if it means having to appear on those silly clips put up on the Eaden’s website and on YouTube. But if she is to do this, she requires perfection.

  And so she is practising with a ferocity that patently irritates her husband, abandoning her usual high standards of housework, as she works in the kitchen from breakfast until late afternoon. It is the more delicate, elegant creations she is focusing on: brandy snaps, almond tuiles, Florentines, melting moments. These are biscuits that require precision: the delicate placing of the exact amount of mixture on a baking tray, or the piping of same-sized shells. These are no homely cookies, created by dropping slapdash spoonfuls of dough, but exquisite mouthfuls which exist to tantalise. This is baking designed to showcase her substantial skill.

  She has run out of ground almonds though, and, while the internet order containing these will come tonight, she cannot wait and so pops to her local Eaden’s, keen to track down the ingredient. It is lunchtime and the store is more packed than usual with office workers queuing with sandwiches and drinks or fitting in a quick shop. As she crosses the car park, she notes a Volvo estate with a familiar registration plate. Nigel’s car. She feels a jolt of surprise at seeing it out of context. Her bearings have shifted. His domain is the surgery, so what is he doing here?

  This morning, she dispatched him with a Thai salad served with marinated – skinless – chicken breast. But maybe he does crave pasta? Perhaps he is not really abstemious and has sneaked out for a secret stash of carbs? To her surprise, she finds this endearing, not merely irritating. Maybe he craves her cooking and she can surprise him. Mentally, she prepares a meal of seduction: steak with brandy sauce, dauphinoise potatoes and a token side salad of rocket and watercress.

  She moves between the parked cars, intent on finding him poised over a Belgian bun or snaffling a pork pie – though both choices seem unlikely. And then she stops. He too is making his way through the cars, and he is not alone.

  His head is thrown back in laughter, and there is a joyfulness about him that makes him look younger than his fifty-four years. His stride is purposeful, suggesting he is a man of energy and vigour. But it is the subtle closeness of his body to that of Gabby Arkwright – wife of the local GP, keen triathlete, and a family friend – that draws the eye. The way he leans towards her as she turns to him to share her joke, her pretty, neat features lit up, her dark eyes intent on his. The way his arm moves behind her back, not touching but guiding her with a gentle solicitousness as they wend their way through the moving vehicles. He is just being Nigel, she tells herself; ever courteous, ever charming – particularly to the more attractive of her friends. And then his hand comes to rest in the small of Gabby’s back, snug against her gym Lycra, and it rests there; no longer just guiding but proprietorial. And she knows, without needing to look – though she is transfixed; she cannot look away – that his strong fingers will stroke the small of her back before brushing over her bottom. And with that small gesture – so fleeting that any acquaintance, or patient, could dismiss it – her world, as she knows it, turns upside down.

  Shielded by a silver Land Rover Discovery, her bowels slacken. Then, acrid bile spurts into her mouth. Her body is betraying her: her heart pounds and her vision blackens. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. She leans against the solid metal of the car and bends forward, hands squarely on knees. Her breasts encase her as she puts her head down, waits for the faintness to subside.

  She does not know how she gets home; driving her Renault Espace on autopilot through country lanes she has known for the past thirty years. She would like to think she drives safely – she always drives safely – and yet there is an uncharacteristic recklessness to her as she careers round corners. Things fall apart. And middle-aged women drive with abandon.

  She feels numb. And yet her head spins; thoughts kaleidoscoping as she pieces together a shared lift here, a dinner-party joke there. When did it start? Where is it going? And how could he – how could she – do it? Twenty-five years of marriage and twenty-odd year
s of friendship have proved as fragile as the cobwebs jewelled with dew drops clinging to the hedgerows. That small gesture has blown the one apparent certainty in her life apart.

  In moments of crisis, Jenny does what she always does: she cooks. She needs to preoccupy herself. To excise the hatred, the sorrow and the shame. This is a day to pound, to knead, to bash. This is not a day for millefeuille but for tenderising steak with a rolling pin; for pummelling dough; for downing glasses of robust Merlot as she concocts a beef pie that smells of iron and fortitude, that will offer the ultimate comfort, and that she cannot bear to eat.

  She rips the brown skin off an onion, discarding its paper-thin coating; cuts swiftly, the knife slipping through the onion’s core and prompting extra tears. Olive oil and butter are hurled into the Le Creuset and fizz, the heat on too high. She tumbles diced steak with mustard and pepper, and starts as she watches her fingers: painted with crimson red; transformed by the brightness of the blood.

  It is only once she smells the sweetness of the onions softening in butter that she realises this is the same meal she cooked as a seventeen-year-old, for her father and sister on the night her mother died.

  And it is then that the tears fall; tears for a relationship that has spanned three decades and for a bereaved teenager, taught to cook by her mother, for whom food has always been love.

  10

  If you are lucky enough to have a daughter, do pass on your love of baking. You will teach her a desirable skill – and grow even closer as you work together.

  ‘So, is this how you spend your mornings?’ There is a whisper of scorn in Frances’s voice as she sweeps into her kitchen, taking in the array of biscuits still resting on the wire racks.

  A chill air has entered the room and it is not – Vicki thinks – purely down to the blast of sub-zero wind that whisked through the hall as she let in her mother. The faintest hint of disapproval tinges the atmosphere, imperceptible to anyone other than her daughter who has had a lifetime to become attuned to its every nuance.