Take another little piece of my heart
Learning to be the best baker for the most important audience
I love watching other people bake.
I firmly believe—and I’ve shared this theory before—that everyone is innately either a baker or a cook by disposition, and I am avowedly a cook, if only by default. Baking requires patience, precision, and a steady hand; I have none of these things. In the kitchen as in life at large, I prefer to work from impulse and passion and feel, things that are bound to lead you astray when baking.
(They’re not terrific qualities for an architect, either, but we’re not here to talk about my professional limitations.)
Point is, I’d rather watch someone who knows what they’re doing make a cake than muck one up myself.
Shows like the wildly-popular Great British Bake Off are like catnip to me, but my appreciation of the medium doesn’t stop there; I’ll watch on down to the dregs of holiday-themed baking competitions on the Food Network, and scroll endlessly though cake-decorating TikToks and time-lapse videos of cookies being intricately-adorned with royal icing on Instagram.
There’s something oddly soothing about such media, seeing someone work precisely in such an inherently fickle and fluid medium as cake and frosting. I’ll watch serenely as these highly-skilled bakers conjure up precise artistic creations from little more than flour, butter, sugar and eggs, confident in the knowledge that I could no more do what they’re doing than I could hit a home run off Major League pitching.
Every once in a while, though, I toy with the notion that I could change.
If only I applied myself, I think, I could learn how to do that.
I could become a baker.
The thought passes quickly, though. Becoming a skilled baker would take years of hard work and practice. It would require changing not just how I operate in front of a stove, but how I comport myself as a person.
It would require a deeper change.
My daughter turned six yesterday, or at least, that’s what she tells me.
I checked her math twice, and while I can’t find any flaws in it, the number still seems inconceivable to me. She’s my youngest, my baby, my precious and precocious forever toddler.
She can’t be six already. She’s four until I say otherwise.
I’ve realized that having children is a bit like installing mirrors all over your house.
They’re not all perfect mirrors; they’re often distorted like those in a funhouse, each one reflecting different aspects of your own personality back at you—some exaggerated, others diminished, but all strangely familiar in an unsettling way.
My son is, in many ways, a clear reflection of me.
He looks exactly like I did at seven years old, and he acts exactly as I did for much of my childhood. (And, to be fair, a good portion of my adulthood too.) He’s talkative and lawyerly, alternately brooding and bombastic, enthusiastic and neurotic, and even shares a few physical tics I’d forgotten I had. I love him dearly, even as I often find myself muttering “oh, that’s what I’m like, huh?” when we butt heads.
My daughter reflects back different qualities, ones that are less obvious.
In many ways, she reflects the things I’m more hesitant to bring out in myself. She’s passionately artistic, content to spend an hour getting a single drawing just right. She’s fearless, willing to jump with full confidence that someone will catch her. She’s got a big motor and a small battery, content to be the life of the party for fifteen minutes before retreating to a quiet corner to recharge. She doesn’t obsess about the things she says, and doesn’t couch her thoughts in anyone else’s expectations.
She asks for what she wants.
The requests change each year, but the shape is the same.
My wife inherited a pair of heart-shaped cake pans from her grandmother—our daughter’s namesake. The pans date back to the 1950s, and have been used for countless special-occasion German Chocolate cakes and birthday cakes for my wife and her many siblings decades before they came into our possession.
We wouldn’t think of baking a birthday cake in anything else.
Our kids invariably end up with two birthday celebrations—a classmates-and-friends party dutifully held from 2pm to 4pm on the most convenient Saturday afternoon roughly adjacent to their birthday, but also a private party of just the four of us on their actual birthday. The former usually get cupcakes from Walmart or a sheet cake from Costco, owing to the logistical complications of throwing a party for several dozen children; the latter gets the heart-shaped cake.
The cakes themselves are rarely anything special; a store-bought boxed mix and canned frosting, hastily pulled together the night before their birthday; they’re pretty much the same every year.
Where they differ, of course, is the decoration.
Each year, we ask the kids what kind of cake they want, and their requests are different each time. Between them, we’ve had requests for Pikachu and a mermaid, Darth Vader and a flower, the Mandalorian and hearts, a pirate’s treasure map and a unicorn.
Each year, I do my best to bring their vision to life, whatever it is.
I asked her just before bed the night before her birthday what she’d like this year.
“A PANDACORN!”
I cocked my head.
“What’s a pandacorn?”
“It’s a panda that’s also a unicorn and it’s got a horn like a unicorn!”
“Oh. I suppose that makes sense… at least from a name standpoint.”
“I can’t wait to see it!”, she effused, trotting off to her room.
“Yeah, me too,” I thought.
I pulled out a sketchpad before starting; I’d never seen a pandacorn before, so I had to take a few stabs on paper before committing things to icing. The first sketch looked bad. I frowned. A Google Image search for “panda unicorn” cake didn’t help any. There were plenty of results, mind you, but they were all artful, crafty, Pinterest-worthy creations of fondant and frosting made by steadier and more experienced hands than my own. They also weren’t quite pandacorns, not how she described them.
I closed the tab, and went back to my sketchpad.
A rough idea started to take shape; one side of the heart-shaped field would be a purple panda—the purple was part of her specification—surrounded on the other half by a swirl of color meant to represent, loosely, a unicorn’s flowing tail.
It didn’t look great, but it didn’t look half-bad either.
Committing it to sugar would be the bigger challenge.
My hand shook and my palms sweated as I squeezed out narrow beads of black icing to outline the creature. Each time I started and stopped a line, I ended up with a thorny protrusion of icing. The panda’s face looked more like a cat, I thought, but I soldiered ahead, lining out paws and a unicorn-ish horn that sort of resembled a party hat. (Still on theme, at least.)
I awkwardly filled in the “dark” areas on the panda with purple icing, then filled in wide bands of color from a few types of decorative sprinkles I’d rooted out in the back of the pantry, sprinkles that probably aren’t much younger than the kids by now. The edges jittered and smeared, the sprinkles strayed over their intended boundaries, the icing’s color bleeding over and staining the red areas black.
I attempted a few little tweaks with the tip of a butter knife, but stopped before I made anything worse.
I finished, and stepped back to consider my handiwork.
Well, if nothing else, I figured, it’s best dang pandacorn I’ve ever seen.
The next morning—her birthday—she spotted the cake sitting under cover on the kitchen counter as soon as she came out from her bedroom.
She practically bounced across the room to peer in at it.
“Daddy! Daddy! Can I see the cake?”
I crossed my fingers mentally. I know these years are precious and fleeting, and all I want to do is to make their childhoods magical while they’re still young enough to believe in magic. I’m not standing before surly judges or a television audience on a baking show. I’m not worried about how the cake looks to anyone else. I’m only worried that I wasn’t able to capture what she was looking for, that I didn’t match the vision.
I popped the cover off.
“What do you think?”
She took a deep breath in; I did, too.
“It’s the best cake ever! I love it!” She hugged my leg tightly. “Thank you, Daddy!”
I exhaled.
“Happy birthday, sweetie. I love you.”
—Scott Hines (@actionookbook)
Copyright that Pandacorn, you've got a gold mine of a children's show if you pair him with Holly as a pair of word detectives who solve vocabulary mysteries.
The Pandacorn is outstanding. Excellent work. We don't have special cake pans here, but we do have a particular cake serving plate and set of cake plates. They're cut glass with hearts around the edges and not particularly fancy -- except that I got them for Mrs DG as a gift back when we were young and skint and buying the things for Christmas seemed an impossible splurge. In any event, they are now the official "birthday plates" and must be used for any family celebration. My mother-in-law specifically requested them for her 89th birthday on Sunday. Much as your cake pans imbue flavor because of the love, I think those plates do the same.