Entry #1 — Juan’s Baking Blog :)
Hi!!!!! & nice to meet you ☺️
Always loved being in the kitchen. I wanted to be a chef when I was in middle school. Wanted to be a baker at one point. Dropped all of it, I’m an accountant now. BUT, these things (especially the baking) have come back to me in what I think is a new stage in my life. Sometimes it is in time-consuming ways, like binging Hell’s Kitchen & yelling harder and louder than Gordy does (burning the scallops is embarrassing, where’s the respect for the customer). Or, in actual joyful ways, like baking cookies (my niche rn) & giving them to lovely people I know or trying (& failing) to bake cakes lol.
As this is my first blog post, I’ll be writing about what I’ve baked up to now & just little other things in my kitchen that have made me laugh or smile or whatever :) Probably a little about the bakery I hope to open one day too
I picked baking back up a few months ago, and I’ve been loving it so far. & up to now, I mostly stick to cookies. Sometimes the ideas come from wanting to learn basics, something I remember really liking from when I was a kiddo, or from discussions at my with friends.
My 1st try was chocolate chip cookies and lemme tell ya sports fans, they are HEINOUS to master lol. Took me 3 tries iirc. Look at first try!
2nd try also looked like this. But, look at 3rd try!
Absolutely amazing, aren’t they! I forgot to snap a photo of them finished, but I did crush it :) trust 🤝 3rd try was actually on New Year’s Day & I just think that it’s cool that I popped off on the 1st day of the year and what so happens to also be my favorite day of the year.
Making these I learned about lots of little things I didn’t know are ESSENTIAL to baking: room temp ingredients are a must, don’t pack the dry ingredients (mistake on 1st 2 tries), weighing all ingredients is infinitely more accurate than measuring cups, and chilling your dough for a bit can help it mix better like how you rest a steak. I did never learn to brown butter, I always burn it. Idk how people say they see the color change, it just looks yellow to me and then develops black and brown specks & that’s I guess when it’s burned L. lemme show ya
Anyways, I haven’t tried to do this since, keeping it on easy mode by microwaving the butter for 5 seconds instead.
Next, I baked Mexican Wedding Cookies!! I am proudly Mexican and these were staples at the millions of quinceañeras and weddings I went to as a kiddo. LOOK!
I made brownies after! Not from scratch, but I still changed the recipe a bit, so sorta from scratch. I actually did a fair amount of research on brownies and people came to a consensus that making a great brownie from scratch was astonishingly difficult, but you could change the box recipe a bit and come out a winner. Everywhere I read said using the Ghirardelli triple chocolate mix was the play. Iirc I swapped oil for butter and added an extra egg :) Didn’t snap a photo of these, I think it was like 1 in the morning when I finished.
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On a whim after the brownies, I decided to make Peanut Butter Blossoms. Got the idea for those scrolling TikTok lol. Not much to say, but they were gas.
Another day at work during daily scheduled chatting time with my friends in the office across mine, my friend Jessica brought up the fact that Reese’s pieces are no longer real, like not real chocolate other pb. & I decided to make my own. Bought some fancy chocolate (don’t remember which one) & the finest pb HEB had to offer.
They are a little misshapen, but they were amazing! & real ingredients! But, I wanted to accompany these with something else, as our other friend in the office is allergic to nuts, so no pb for her. & I landed on Vanilla Whoopie Pies!!! Most of the recipes for these were for chocolate ones, but I didn’t wanna bake something else chocolate & I found one for vanilla ones.
My other friend, Madeline sometimes brings in cakes her mom makes to the office & I like to leave notes on the containers when the cake finishes. Usually, I say that I’m not much a fan of chocolate cake, but her mom created a miracle that day and she made one I liked. Loved in fact. & then I decided to make a cake. A vanilla cake in fact (my favorite).
Historically, I don’t have the stomach to bake cakes. I tend to open the oven & poke the cake so many times until it’s done, but has also sunk in the middle. Sometimes, it doesn’t rise. Other times, I didn’t even decide to throw it in the oven from the disaster I made just mixing.
So, I went to HEB, bought a new cake pan (more on this later), and actual mixing bowls that don’t move on the counter.
So, the cake pan. What happened to the cake pan? Well, I bought one that has like a hinge on the side, so you can unstick the cake from the pan easier. I thought woah! How genius! Turns out those types of pans leak & I had to put a layer of parchment paper under the batter to make it work. After fixing that, the cakes baked fine! I wanted to go big and decided to make a 2 layer one.
One sunk a bit, but I made that the bottom layer lol. Cakes done. Made my own frosting too. Frosting always beat me before too. Most of the time, it came out like incredibly sweet soup or once it just tasted plain rancid.
So, the frosting more than worked. But, I didn’t make enough and ran out of ingredients to make more. It was also, like 10 at night. Couldn’t go out to go buy more stuff.
I couldn’t quite cover the cake and didn’t even want to take it to work the next day. Messaged my wise friend Jessica & a teaspoon of encouragement later and I kept going. I threw the sprinkles on it and decided it was cool to take. Rave reviews the next day, not even trying to flex, but like it was my first cake to work. & it was moist, so moist. Don’t nobody want no dry cake.
After the cake, I haven’t baked since, but I plan to pick it back up slowly in the next few weeks. I might remake the chocolate chip cookies or the Mexican wedding cookies. Those were my favorites of what I’ve made till now. I like to take pictures of what I make and especially seeing people smile when I give it out. So, I’ll be writing about the things I bake and what the story was; why I baked that & what happened while I made it. Sometimes, it really is like Curious George was let loose in the kitchen.
& that’s my first blog post. This week, I was showing a friend some of the dreams I remembered and had written down. They made me laugh & I decided to write them. Anyways, friend said I was very descriptive and they laughed alot at what I wrote and I left and opened my blog.
-Baker Juan Ruiz
