Although our baking was successful in that we made things, ate them, and liked some of them, the experiment has finished. It has been kyboshed by our incompatible tastes. I don’t like sugary things, my partner only likes the fluffy stuff.
Yeast eats sugar and puts on so much weight that it swells the cake (which might not be an entirely accurate description of the process). The problem is that the sponge cake recipes we used had so much sugar in them that the flavour wasn’t so much delicious as poisonous, to me. My partner liked them. Even so, we tried a low sugar cake, with the same results. It could be that we were using the wrong yeast, but I’m not willing to make the effort to seek alternatives. I’ve never really like sponge cake for its sickly sweetness, so I suspect there are no alternative yeasts that can produce a sponge cake that I’ll enjoy.
Of course, we can and did make a cake that wasn’t ridiculously sugary, a tea loaf. I liked it, a lot, even though I don’t normally enjoy sultanas and raisins. But my partner didn’t like it at all; she found it too hard.
It seems we have no cake in common.
What about bread? Well, I used to bake bread when I lived in the UK and Ireland, because it’s not possible to buy good bread there. But I now live in a country with decent bakers. I see little point in making edible bread when I can spend 50 cents at Lidl and get a much better baguette (not, I might add, the horrid things at 29 cents), or treat ourselves to something extraordinary and delicious for a whole €2.
The only baking that’s likely to be repeated here is Yorkshire Pudding.
Our baking was an interesting exploration, and worth doing, but it’s done.