The smell of butter extract fills the air. Recipes scattered all about. Ingredients strung across the counters. Dirty measuring cups piled up in the sink. Through all the mess, freshly baked cookies sit invitingly on a cookie sheet.
During the recent pandemic, people all over the world took up baking as a hobby, including freshman Kayden Aishe. Her love for baking started a little over a year ago, after making a box cake at her friend’s house. “We hung out again the next weekend and made another cake,” said Aishe. “Over time, we started baking more and more things from scratch together, and eventually, I started baking on my own as well.”
\tMany people’s favorite part of baking is the end result of eating their product, but Aishe’s favorite part is taking a recipe and making it her own. “Once you get a feel for what different ingredients do, altering recipes to your liking becomes really easy,” she explained. “I kind of just put random stuff in and see how it turns out. I usually start by using a recipe, then I start altering things based on how I feel. One time, I did this using a peanut butter cookie recipe. I decided to switch out the peanut butter for pumpkin puree and they turned out delicious.”
Her favorite thing to bake is cookies. “If you’re using a simple recipe, they are really hard to mess up,” said Aishe. “I also like cookies because I’ve made them so much that they have become very familiar and comforting to make. They also taste really good and there is a wide range of different types and flavors.”
Aishe said she usually baked two to four times a week. “For the last day of last semester, I decided to bake cookies for all of my teachers as a Christmas present,” she said. “This ended up taking about six hours on a school night.”
A kitchen with an oven on produces many delicious scents. For Aishe, the ultimate smell is butter extract. “It goes in almost everything I bake,” she said. “I’ve even thought about putting a small amount in the oven by itself, just to make the entire house smell like it.”
Although baking full time is not the exact path she wants to take, Aishe would like to do something with baking on the side of her full-time job in adulthood. “I could definitely see myself doing something with culinary arts past high school,” she explained. “The idea of working at a small bakery sounds amazing. The biggest inspiration to me in baking is local smaller businesses. Another inspiration is probably reality TV shows that feature baking. I always found them so entertaining when I was a kid, and it definitely caused me to have an appreciation for baking from a young age.”
Of course, not every baking project results in a perfect masterpiece.
“One time, I was playing around with ingredients and thought it would be a good idea to use coconut oil. I put it in the cookies, not realizing that I was using cosmetic coconut oil rather than baking coconut oil,” she explained. “When I tried one to see how the batch turned out, I thought it tasted off and threw the rest away. The next day I was walking around school, and suddenly got very sick. Take this as a sign to check your ingredients.”