Advice For Amateur Bakers

If you are a serious amateur baker, you're going to need one thing above all others and that is people to eat your product. After all, you can't eat quantities of baked goods intended for several people all by yourself. That's a good way to end up hideously fat and washing yourself with a rag on a stick. How to find that audience and what to bake for them is a challenge all amateur bakers face and it is the most defining one. Having been seriously pursuing amateur baking for some seven years now, I can tell you that I've learned a few tricks for how to make things go smoothly. Rather than my usual long paragraph form, I'll make a list of tips with brief explanations underneath them. This is not a guide for how to bake itself. If got want that, purchase Alton Brown's I'm Just Here For More Food and follow it like the damned Bible.

1. For small groups, stick to your ringers:

I have a mental list of recipes that I know always work and always wow. If I've got a small group or if it's an important event, I know I have to stick to my ringers. Otherwise, I could end up throwing away a lot of food and/or embarrassing myself.

2. For medium groups you can experiment, but only a little.

If you've got a good amount of people, you can change some variables to your ringers, so long as it's only a couple of them. By that, I mean a different shaped pan, brand of product, flavoring agent, and that type of general thing. If it's not quite as good, but close, enough will be consumed to avoid embarrassment.

3. For large groups, you can try brand new things.

Generally speaking, if a baked good is present and is at least of passable flavor and texture, a large group will chomp through it with no problems. Get as creative as you want here, but bear in mind that the important next rule is absolutely crucial here because there's no point if you don't...

4. Taste any food you're going to serve to people.

You don't know it's good until it's good, even if it's a ringer you've made many times before. One never knows when something unnoticed will go wrong and for that reason you should always...

5. Give yourself time to make a last-ditch ringer in case whatever you're making doesn't turn out.

We all have bad days and people are counting on you. Have a backup plan.

6. Where possible precut.

Finding a knife or transporting a knife is a pain and a half. Cut right before you're going to take your baked goods to their destination and everyone will have an easier time.

7. Try and bake things that don't require a plate and fork.

Cookies, muffins, brownies, candies, and the like all make for an easier time with less trash created.

8. If you must bake things that require plates and forks, provide them.

I don't care if you have a blood oath from the people you're taking baked goods to that they will provide paper plates and forks, never count on it.

9. Never take chocolate chip cookies paired with anything else.

You will have to throw away the something else. Trust me.

10. Check if they'll have something else before you bring something.

You'll either upstage or be upstaged. Neither ends well.

-Frank