What is the point of baking?

[waitingforautumn]

OK to cover myself - I'm actually not a bad baker (promise! :)) my issue is that baking - while highly therapeutic, is not necessarily cheap, and it leaves you with a commitment to eating the baked good all week!! (doesn't sound like a bad thing does it...). Cakes in particular are quite hard to scale down.

AIBU to just prefer a supermarket / cafe slice of cake etc to spare myself the faff and expense of baking, and the smaller/individual portion sizes?! I know they are rarely as good as the home baked kind but some of them can be very decent. I get FOMO for not baking when a lot of friends and family do it - they make it look so fun and rewarding! Yet when I bake I totally lose interest in the final product after I've had one portion.

I spent a large chunk of last weekend baking a half size chocolate cake (it could still feed 10 tbh!), and by the end I just wish I'd gone to M&S lol. Especially now, 4 days later, when the fam are all bored of it and the remainder of this cake is just sitting there uneaten, getting drier and drier every day... yet we all feel too guilty to throw it away. It wasn't a very nice recipe actually. Not chocolatey enough and was on the dry side to begin with. But thats just part of the risk of trying a new recipe I suppose.

Or am I just missing the point of baking???? Is it supposed to be something people only do when feeding a crowd? How often do you bake and why do you do it? Does it all get eaten?? If you crave something in particular are you more likely to bake it or go out and buy it?

Getting bored of cake isn’t a problem in my house. Eating the whole cake is the problem.

Home-made is usually nicer, but there's a quantity issue.

I have a friend who is always trying to lose weight and goes jogging, to weight watchers and so on, but they bake about 3 or 4 times a week!

I love the odd bit of baking, but I do ask the teens not to do it too often!

I think baking is actually one of the few hobbies that has a purpose and doesn't litter the world with just more stuff hanging around. Very few bought cakes are as nice as home made in my opinion. I often use muffin cases to make individual cakes as they seem the perfect portion to me.

How many cakes do people eat??
I would be the size of a house if I baked.

I like to make things that you cannot buy in store. However some things are not worth the bother. I’ve made for example a key lime pie for dessert once. The amount of time, effort and money there really is no point. So much cheaper in a supermarket. I find cakes in bakeries look really nice but taste horrible. I’m always disappointed!!

I’m not big on cake but homemade is 100% better than any shop bought cake . I only bake for an occasion otherwise we’d have to eat cake daily and it’s not worth the calories to me.

I do both. We have bought goodies mostly but then when I bake a cake my teens are chuffed to bits. Nothing I bake lasts long enough to spoil.
Another poster was right to say chocolate cakes are tricky. There are lots of other really delicious cakes that are so easy to make. My lot love a home made pie for dinner too, they basically prefer any home made stuff to shop bought.

I kind of agree with you, OP.

I only tend to bake cakes for parties. Although my chocolate cake did get eaten, even by my cake averse teen.
But it doesn't take me more than 30 min prep and then oven.

More complex cakes, I prefer to buy slices from bakeries.

I hate supermarket cake........homemade all the way!!

Freezing cake in slices means you don't get fed up of eating the same thing. I made 18 muffins yesterday, most are now in the freezer and will be eaten over the next 2 months.

Homemade bread is so much nicer too!

I make bread using a machine.

I do a big fruit cake every Christmas. I make family birthday cakes.

We have a plum tree and also the use of my neighbour's apple tree so I freeze a lot of stewed fruit and make crumbles.

If we have bananas that are going a bit too ripe I make banana bread.

I always use butter, never margarine.

Baking with my daughter was a good way of getting her interested in cooking.

I bake often because I enjoy it and it is far tastier than supermarket cakes/biscuits. It can be expensive but I keep my ingredients topped up so one recipe never costs a fortune.

If its a large recipe I halve it and make a loaf cake, freeze some or give some to family/friends. I also like the fact that it only has what I put in it - not so many additives etc.

I lobe baking. My cupcakes are pounced on at work way before the shop bought stuff. Tbf I have also seen a lot of shit home baking. And there are some delicious shop bought cakes out there too.

Agree with freezing any excess cakeage.

I think you need to bake more. With practice you would find the right cakes, though I can't imagine getting bored with cake!!

This is a wonderful chocolate cake and it keeps well, I have no knowledge of how it tastes after 4 days though! www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/double-chocolate-loaf-cake

For me it's all about

• sensory experience - literally nothing comes close to a freshly baked cake from your own oven in terms of taste, smell, texture, visual
• health - the ingredients on commercially produced cakes are horrifying. Home baked cakes have

Excess cake? 😆 that's funny

I have never ever had a shop bought cake that comes close to what I bake at home. They're just tasteless sugary fluff and sickly sweet icing.

In my house baked goods very rarely last 48 hours, even the healthier lower sugar versions.

Cheese scones freeze brilliantly. A warm cheese scone, defrosted in the microwave, with soup is lunch for the gods.

I think cooking is a complete waste of time. I have no interest in 'baking' as a hobby. But I like cakes so I make them now and then. I stick to recipes I know or are reliably moist as I hate dry cake. If a cake gets left in too long for some reason I slosh alcohol on it to moisten it and/or turn it into trifle.

One really good shop cake is Sainsbury's coffee walnut. Far better than the Waitrose & M&S versions. Soft, gooey, lovely butter cream. Cheap too.

*- health - the ingredients on commercially produced cakes are horrifying. Home baked cakes have

I cannot believe people would rather eat a gummy, overly sweet shop cake that is probably full of trans fats. Yuck. It’s not even worth the calories.

Also, the point of baking is that you get to lick the spoon.

It makes me happy and the end product is infinitely nicer than anything I could buy in a supermarket.

It’s also a nice thing to do with teenagers. It’s one of the few times they chat to me properly.

Either someone's a seriously incompetent baker, or using shit ingredients. Use decent quality ingredients and your cakes will be miles better than the nicest shop bought cakes

How can it be the ingredients? I use the cheapest butter, sugar and flour available, supermarket free range eggs, and Aldi value brand chocolate. You can't get anything cheaper as an individual and my baking is lovely. I'm probably never going to win bake off, but it's all perfectly delicious.

I agree. I'd rather just a single serve of whatever I fancy. Just because I fancy it now doesn't mean I'm going to want it more than once and DS and I like different things. I'd rather a bar of 85% chocolate 95% of the time anyway.

YABU. Shop-bought cakes are often rubbish imo. They are full of all kinds of horrible unnecessary ingredients and often tooth-achingly sweet but with a lot less actual flavour than homemade.

The point of baking is that it tastes better and you choose what goes into it. Baking isn't a hobby for me, I just like the taste. Same reason I cook meals from scratch instead of buying ready meals!