Home Baker

Dear future children,
Nailed It! is a short series, which features home bakers that compete for a $10,000 cash prize. The phrase “nailed it” comes from back in my day, in which people tried to create a cake or baked good from Pinterest or another internet site and failed miserably. After the contestants created their cake, donut, cookie, or other baked good, they turned it around for the judges to see and said: “nailed it!” While they never actually “nailed it,” they were being more sarcastic, which is what most people use the term for when they fail miserably after trying to create a cake from Pinterest.

Now I am a “home baker,” but I have more experience than the contestants chosen for the show, which is why I wouldn’t be allowed to be a contestant. I’ve done cake decorating and baking since I was sixteen, and I hope to still be doing cakes as a small side job and a fun hobby when you, my future children, will be reading this. I hope to make your birthday cakes myself and also continue to take orders from family and friends.

Since I have some knowledge about baking cakes and other goodies, I thought I would enjoy watching this series, but at some points, it was hard to watch as some of the contestants made huge mistakes while baking. A few of the mistakes they made while baking was frosting their still-warm cakes, not cutting out the sugar cookie with their cookie cutter before baking, fill the cake pans way too full, and completely forgetting to use buttercream under their fondant.

Now, I hope to teach you, my future children, a little about baking as you grow up, so here are a few things the contestants did that ruined their cakes and goodies.

Most of the contestants wouldn’t use the cake cooler they had on set. They would try to put buttercream on their warm cakes and expect it to stay on them. Now please excuse me while I get a bit frustrated: the buttercream has butter in it (who would have guessed) and what does butter do when it goes on a warm potato? It melts. So their cakes were kind of droopy and the icing was half melted. Luckily, the show is dedicated to home bakers who don’t really know what they are doing so it’s totally fine when they completely ruin their cakes, plus it makes for great television.

On one of the episodes, the contestants were challenged to make a sugar cookie that looked like them. One of the contestants decided that she didn’t have time to cut out three sugar cookies from her dough, so she was going to cut it out after the dough was baked. By doing this, the cookie didn’t look as nice; it didn’t have crisp, clean edges like it would have if the dough was cut before it all baked together. The dough also took a lot longer to bake, which cost her more time.

This also ties together with many contestants who wanted their cakes to be thick cakes, so they filled their pans pretty full. What they should have done would have been to bake more thin layers, this way the cakes would bake A LOT faster and not overflow. One contestant filled her cake pans so full the cake was still runny in the middle and she was running out of time. I have to give her kudos, though. She didn’t let that stop her from creating a cake- she grabbed some rice crispy treats from the ingredient pantry and used that as her cake and placed what little cake was baked from her pan on top, then decorated it. Rice crispies are used as bases for cakes when they need structure, like in a really tall cake or a sculpted one, so it wasn’t too crazy of an idea.

On a few of the cakes the contestants were challenged to create, they would have to use fondant. They, of course, had recipes to follow and plenty of times they completely skipped over a step in making the cake or assembling it. This is understandable, though since they were being timed and didn’t really know how to do everything. One contestant didn’t make buttercream to go under his fondant, so when he tried to get his fondant to basically lay on his cake, which was the shoulders of Trump, it slid off. Fondant needs a glue to stick to since it isn’t able to stick to something alone.

To my future children, I hope you enjoy baking as much as I do, and I hope I am able to teach you some tips and tricks as I raise you to be your own people.
Love, your future mommy