Have people just got a lot better at baking?

[Sunflowering]

Or is it just me?

When I was little (born late 70s) home baking was a popular pastime but generally the things people made weren't that brilliant- homemade bread was always like a brick, homemade cake was generally an overcooked sponge that had gone a bit wrong or rock cakes. Or chocolate cake made by swapping a spoonful of flour for cocoa. All gratefully eaten by me obviously but pretty hit and miss.

Now everyone I know who bakes (including myself) makes things which are pretty much as good as you'd get from a professional baker. Homemade bread is a treat. Cakes are almost always perfect and far more elaborate than anyone would have attempted at home in the 70s-80s.

Just wondered if other people had found this? I can think of various reasons- the popularity of baking shows as inspiration, the internet as a source of knowledge, people maybe spending more on ingredients, more reliable ovens etc. But I wondered whether other people had noticed the phenomenon. Maybe my mum and her friends were just shit cooks, but even my mum has upped her game now.

I am not much of a baker. But I have discovered a very easy Mary Berry chocolate cake. I worked it out, because I am like that, it takes €2.11 for me to make it. I put all the ingredients into my food processor, then into the tin and into the ninja for 30 minutes. And yay, I have a beautiful, non chemically tasting cake for afternoon breaks all week.

So the internet gave me the recipe and kitchen appliances made it fool proof for me.

I think more people are baking than I ever remember and baking more ambitious items

Often with home bakers I've found it's style over substance though ... beautifully cooked Victoria sponge say or scones are still a skill.

Saying that a lady I work with must be Mary Berry's long lost sister ... she made malt loaf a few weeks ago. She handed it round and it was just a Joyful Silence all round as we slowly ate it

The only times I've ever had to bake something for school I always made cornflake buns. Cheap chocolate, cheap cornflakes and bun cases. Maybe a mini egg on top if lucky. According to DC these were the first things snapped up by the kids at school 😂Why go to all that trouble if all the kids want are cornflake buns.

I think it’s that internet recipes come with ratings and reviews and comments saying what works well and what doesn’t. Back in the day the recipe was out of a magazine or book and you had no idea of it was shit till you tried it. Nowadays you can trawl the internet for a recipe with thousands of 5 star reviews and tips on the comments from people who’ve tried it and how to spruce the recipe up even further.

Our DC must go to the same school 😐

I actually really miss golf old home baking. It’s all a bit overblown and fancy now. I don’t like cupcakes with huge whirls of sickly buttercream - I want little fairy cakes with a bit of glacé icing and some jelly diamonds, or some little scones (not the huge ones you get now). And I was only thinking the other day that I haven’t had or made rock cakes for nearly 40 years. That’s what I’ll do this weekend - bake rock cakes and that chocolate concrete stuff that you used to get for school dinners.

My mum used to bake bread in the 80s and it was always delicious and her cakes were good too - I think some people had the knack and some didn’t but it depended upon how you’d been taught to make as there was no internet for people to look at to teach themselves.

I’ve just remembered that we had a Good Housekeeping recipe book from around 1990 which had a recipe for brownies in it. I used to make them a lot as a teenager and thought they were really tasty. Looking back, they didn’t contain any real chocolate, just cocoa powder. And chopped mixed nuts (the cheap ones from the supermarket) were an ingredient. I bet they taste very different to brownies now but I think I’d still like them. I’ll have a go at those too.

My maternal grandmothers cakes were absolutely amazing. That woman made all kinds of cakes and bakes which looked incredible with beautiful icing and piped flowers. And she could do it with no mixer and no more fancy icing equipment than a piece of greaseproof paper. I have her recipe book which is full of handwritten recipes, and I guess she started it when she went into service at 14 and added to it all her life
My other grandmother though, her cakes were inedible, and my mums cakes were good but she couldn't be arsed with decorating.
So I don't think things have changed a lot personally

I've been baking mediocre bread and cakes since the 1970s.... and we had cake mix then too.

My 95 year old aunt has been baking fabulous cakes and bread in her Aga since the 1950s.. and my MiL has been superb at sugarcraft for the nearly-30 years that I have known her. DM is a terrible cook, and was buying in birthday cakes as soon as she could.

I think baking skill and talent has certainly existed for decades. Id say that modern ovens help though, and insta has inspired people.

Comments under online recipes can be very helpful, but not invariably.

Useful:

• 2 tbs of salt has to be a mistake, do you mean 2 tsp?
• This was nice, tasted good, not too tricky, I found this freezes very well
• This recipe just doesn't work, for the following reasons ...

Useless:

• Wow, this looks great! I will be making this soon.
• I don't like tomatoes. Can I make this tomato soup with anything else?
• I made this, but I changed every single ingredient for something else, ignored all the instructions and put it in the microwave for three minutes instead of baking in the oven for half an hour. It was awful. Can't recommend this recipe. What a waste of time and money.

Apart from a Dundee cake for Christmas, I never bake now. Stopped baking cakes when DS stopped having whole class parties. And I am sh1t at decorating. Very happy to coo at other people's cakes, but I rarely accept a slice. I save my calories for cheese.

I've been to several parties where the professionally made tiered cake is put in the middle of the table for the little ones to admire and the bday boy or girl blows out the candles, then the kids are given meh cupcakes or even no cake at all! It's so tacky lol!🤣

A combination of all of the above.

I've baked since being a child. DM has never been a baker so it's something I did off my own bat because we had a children's recipe book (and I wanted to make the delicious treats it contained 😁), I then asked for cookery and baking books for Christmases.

But, if recipe's went wrong I didn't know how to fix them, however, now with the internet all the information is just there!

I remember food tech classes (my food tech teacher anyway) also being great for teaching the science behind the cooking/baking. I loved learning why we do the things we do like chilling some ingredients, mixing vs folding, what kneading and proving bread dough does etc. I still search for the science behind recipes and having this basic understanding has helped me become quite an intuitive baker. Now when I bake with my children I explain the reasons behind what we're doing so they learn why we do certain things when we bake and how things can be fixed or altered when need be.

Ovens- the old gas ones used to have variable temperatures all over the oven and so one half of a sponge would be underdone, one overdone with burned bits in the same oven. Electric fan ovens offer an even temperature.

Cake tins- used to be a nightmare to grease and put in parchment paper, no non-stick stuff is in the Pound shop.

These two things make a huge difference.

I do have a friend who still manages to make quite bad cakes though so it is possible.

100% - our summer Fayre was like a who’s who of GBBO. I mean I can bake - I did classes BUT the only reason I did was my son has so many allergies and a cake for him would cost almost 4 x as much.

Not really my experience, the cakes baked by the octogenarians at Church are the best ever.
Most cakes at DC's school events are either crappy cornflake cakes, cheapo shop bought or beautiful decorated but taste unpleasant due to over use of fondant or food colouring.

My mum used to make good cakes when I grew up, just simple ones.

I can make simple tasty sponges and used to go to town decorating them for kids birthdays when they were little (although they’d look like GBBO gone wrong!) but really in this house we like big tasty cakes with minimal or no icing not a mouthful of hard cake and all the icing.

We care more about appearance IMO. Taste not so much.

I used to love making a homemade birthday cake, never looked
Professional and my kids still laugh about some!

My mum used to make rock cakes in the 70s. They were not great but I’m not sure any rock cake is (I have never made them or eaten them since). She did make good Christmas cake though. I would say that baking has got more artistic and creative now. I did some cake decorating courses a few years ago, I loved the contemporary decorating but hated the old, traditional style of decorating and dropped out of that course.

For a lot of people baking has actually become a hobby, rather than just something you do when someone has a birthday or you need some fairy cakes for the cake sale. People invest a lot of time and money in it, just as if it was knitting, or jewellery making, or paper curling or whatever.
There are so many baking shows - not just GBBO. There was one on netflix, set in the US, can't remember what it was called.
People spend time watching the shows, then buy various gadgets, try out recipes several times, order ingredients online, watch videos to learn new techniques and so on. It's easier to learn how to do great piping by watching someone than reading about it in a book as you had to do in the 70s.

Yes I believe in this phenomena!

I spent my student years trying to bake bread and it was always shit, every loaf weighed a ton and was hard and dry and impossible to get through with a knife.

I started baking again a year ago (30 year gap) and now it's bloody lovely!

I have no special equipment at all and I am doing it exactly the same - except - I can't be bothered kneading it so I just do a quick couple of kneads. In the past I would pummel it for the full 5 minutes. I think kneading is overrated and my mum used to knead for, like, 20 minutes. Kills the bread I reckon.

Sorry OP I can't agree with you. I find a lot of today's baking overloaded with sickly icing and makes me feel slightly queasy tbh. They certainly look very impressive but .

flavour and texture are so much more important. Cakes are surely made primarily to be eaten, showing them off on SM is secondary. Though I agree chocolate sponge made by substituting a bit of flour with cocoa was always disappointing. I don't even think cakes dyed all the colours of the rainbow look appetising and red velvet cake just tastes sickly to me. I agree though that flavours are much more adventurous nowadays.
I was born 1960. My mother baked every Saturday morning and I learnt from her. Then even in my very academic high school I had 3 years of compulsory Domestic Science where we learnt every method of baking - apart from choux pastry for some reason. This included making flaky pastry by the traditional method.
But just for the record from someone who was around in the olden days we weren't short of eggs, homemade bread and cakes were delicious, packet cake mixes were readily available though not a patch on homemade, and I, my DM and DMIL are/were excellent bakers, but the emphasis was on taste and texture, not looks.

PS if your rock buns are actually like rocks they're overcooked. Done properly they're gorgeous.

Yes some of them look sickly

I love baking and think there are so many hints online to help now

I have that cookbook, it's great

I was born in the 60s. My mum made really good cakes we lived rurally so buying them wasn't really an option so she baked every week icing wasn't a big thing though.
I also bake every week due to food allergies in the family again not with a lot of icing.
Mainly because icing on a cup cake can more than double the calories.