Q: What inspired you to start baking?
A: My grandma on my dad’s side does bake, so part of my inspiration came from her. We used to call her ‘Cookie Grandma’ because she’d always have cookies for us and we came to visit.
When we travel, [me and my family] always try to have the most authentic food and explore new types of food. And I think that really led me to try making some myself.
Q: How do you usually get your recipe from?
A: A lot of the recipes I just get from YouTube videos or the New York Times. When we traveled to Vienna two years ago to see some family there, I got a cookbook that’s all in German with German cuisine. It takes a lot of time to try to read it, especially because it’s in German and also the recipes are usually pretty complicated. Just for the future of learning German.
Sometimes when we have a good recipe that works out really well, we print it out and put it in this big binder. It’s five inches thick and full of little printed-out recipes from online and sleaze.
Q: What types of baking do you specialize in?
A: I like baking the staples. A lot of them were chocolate chip cookies, blueberry muffins, and strawberry stuff. During the summer, we would go to the farm and pick blueberries and strawberries. We always have so many that we just have to spend several days dedicated to baking as much as we can. They aren’t necessarily things that look very good or fancy, but things that taste good and we give to others.
Q: What are some techniques or strategies you have developed as you gained more experience?
A: I think I did a lot more baking when we were in lockdown when we really did not have much to do. During the pandemic, I made several recipes. Some of them I made mistakes, and I had to keep trying to get it right. One example was making these black and white cookies, which are a staple in New York City, where I have family. They have chocolate and vanilla frosting on them. It was really difficult to get the icings and batter consistencies right because it’s a chewy cookie. It’s kind of almost like cake. Very soft.
Over time I have learned the strategies to make them really good. For example, you can make [chocolate cookies] a lot better by browning the butter, in which you cook it over the stove at a low temperature until fat solids are brown, and then add an interesting caramel-like-butterscotch taste. It’s very subtle but I think it makes a big difference. Some of the recipes I’ve tried have you bang the oven rack halfway through cookie baking, and it makes ripples which adds good texture to the cookies. I also know that it makes them taste better if you just chop the chocolate instead of using chocolate chips.
Q: How do you think your baking has influenced your social life?
A: I made pumpkin muffins before our cross-country meet, and I’ve also bought chocolate chip cookies to Nordic practices. Around the holidays, we often package a mix of cookies we’ve made and deliver them to our neighbors. We enjoy giving them out, and other people do the same thing to us, and we kind of connect through that. It’s always really special when you see these people put all this time into making all these different things for others. And that shows something much bigger: not just baking for yourself but also baking for others.
Q: How long does it usually take to prepare and bake?
A: For chocolate cookie chip cookies, sometimes I like to keep the dough in the fridge for a day to taste a little bit better, but sometimes I don’t have the patience. But typically chocolate cookies can take 30 to 40 minutes. Something like a cake or making several different types of cookies, it can usually take up to at least half a day.
Q:In what ways do you hope to carry on your passion for baking in the future?
A:That’s one thing I want to improve on with my senior project. When it comes to making things dough and bread, I’m not very good at dealing with yeast and I often kill it so things doesn’t rise very much. With my senior project, I’m going to be working with someone who knows a lot about bread and pastries, so I hope I’ll learn some things from him and improve that part of my baking.
I will be working with this small bakery on Randolph called La Boulangerie Marguerite with the head chef Francois Kiemde who went to French pastry school.
So that will be a skill I’ll be working on also like working with someone else without interfering with their business. I want to help them but I also want to make sure I’m not in the way. I’ve never really worked in a professional place like that before in a setting where everything needs to be really well done. When I bake at home, I don’t really have the same expectations of doing really well and make it taste good. But here I’ll have to work under a bit more pressure and that will be a good skill I will learn from it.
Q:How do you express your personality and creativity through baking?
A:I make a lot of very traditional things, but I also like to add a twist to them and personalize them through mixing different recipes together. For my chocolate chip cookies, sometimes I like to add elements from different recipes in order to get the ones that suit me the best. I don’t bake a lot because I don’t often have the time to do it. But when I do, baking is just a way for me to kind of decompress and relax. Making something good and share with others. So that’s maybe a little bit about my personality through baking. I just like to work on myself and try something new, then see how it goes.
When decorating certain things such as cakes and and cupcakes and other things where you need to decorate with icing. I can kind of just add my own little style to it. Although limited by my skill set, it’s still kind of just envisioning something in my head and then putting it onto a final product takes a lot of imagination.
