I have started cooking relatively late in life, starting 12-ish years ago with a cup of coffee so I could prepare a birthday breakfast. Since then I’ve read a lot about cooking and how to mix ingredients and spices to create new dishes and I like to think that I do a pretty good job when using the stove and oven.
Although I still enjoy cooking and do it almost every weekend, since about a year ago I have been in love with baking. Maybe it’s because there are so many reactions going on (you have several ingredients in different formats and end up with something that does not resemble any of them individually; there’s yeast converting sugar into carbon dioxide).
My first baking adventures involved a typical Southern Brazilian cake called “Cuca de Banana” (literally Banana Cake, through the German Kuchen), as well as sweet bread made with Arracacia xanthorrhiza, which is one of my favourites to this day, but implies in too much work (cooking the vegetable, mashing it, mixing everything, fermenting it). Up north I replace the main ingredient with potatoes (beets work well too), but since I fell in love with baking I have not tried this recipe again, rather trying new ones from Pains du monde à faire soi-même, which I got at a very good deal last summer.
The book contains one hundred recipes and about a month ago I decided I’ll give all (or most) of them a try. Everything has been set up on a spreadsheet and every week I enter the information on which types of bread were baked. So far I am at 11.
This is intended to be a long time project for one of my hobbies, the one I am most excited about (at least for the moment), as it gives to so many options to experiment and create. I am not a professional and have never formally studied anything related to cooking, so I make mistakes and will probably post when they happen. This way I can also track my improvement when I retry the recipes that did not quite work out.