“Golden ginger cake” from “Sweet Enough”

Kirstin: There is a page in this book where Roman talks about all the things she hates and and all the things she loves about baking. I particularly empathised with some of her reasons on the hate page—all the washing up and special equipment, for instance. How long it takes butter to soften is another. But one of the reasons Tate does not like to bake is not part of this list, and was the reason that my big mother-daughter bonding plan on a Friday afternoon went awry. I had forgotten that Tate finds the imprecision and general bad writing typical of recipes intensely frustrating.



Now over to Tate, who says: For example, step 4 of the recipe said to ‘[a]dd the eggs, one at a time, until the mixture looks extremely light and fluffy, almost like cake frosting, 5 or so minutes.’ The relation of ‘5 or so minutes’ to the rest of the sentence is unclear and confusing. Are you meant to spend 5 minutes slowly pouring in the two eggs? Obviously not. But the verb that is probably meant to go with it (‘beat together’) is two sentences away in the previous step, and has another action after it. I was annoyed that this (and other) recipe(s) seem to value vibes and (attempts at) colloquial parataxis above actually explaining how to cook the thing in a clear, unambiguous manner. While the moth is happy to guess at what a direction is probably meant to convey, I am not, and as a result there was a fair bit of tussling with individual sentences as we tried to bake this recipe together.



Eventually we came to an agreement where I would finish the cake and Tate could go and recover from cookbook’s crimes against communication. Thankfully though we all agreed when I served the cake that grammar issues or not, this cake was divine! PS Alison Roman, should you ever require a copy editor for your baking recipes please do feel free to contact Tate. They have surprisingly strong opinions about how recipes and directions should be written and I suspect they could do a very good job of it. And I would be happy to try baking along…