My teammate and I were chatting after an evening soccer match yesterday, and she asked, “Did you bake anything for Easter?” I actually had baked for Easter—a lot. I started to enumerate everything.
After I blathered on for a few minutes, she quietly piped up, “I baked something for Easter.”
If I wasn’t so self-consumed, I would have realized sooner the reason she asked about my baking was because she wanted to share about her baking with someone she knew would appreciate it.
She continued, “We had a bunch of extra carrots, and I decided to try a carrot cake. I even did the double layer thingy and everything for the first time. It looked terrible because the cake stuck in the pan, but still!”
In his book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer encourages us to come to our tables ready to share: “So long as we eat our bread together we shall have sufficient even with the least. Not until one person desires to keep his own bread for himself does hunger ensue.”
Bonhoeffer’s admonition applies to so much more than food. We should come ready to share our wins with others. We should come bearing our sorrows to share. Our stories, little talents, projects, and ideas. Our interests. Our wisdom. Our loves. Paul encourages, “Let all things be done for building up” (1 Cor. 14:26).
We often arrive at church, class, work, events, family gatherings as though attendance is basically all we have to offer. But our presence is only the beginning of what we have to give.
What if we arrived at church expecting to share? What if part of our morning routine before school or work was readying a poem, a dish, a story, a sketch, a book, or an idea to share with others? What if we entered our day expecting to give . . . more than to receive?
And what if—unlike me last night after our soccer match—the first thing we readied to give others was a listening ear?
As Bonhoeffer puts it, sharing is what makes pilgrims of us all: “The fellowship of the table teaches Christians that here they still eat the perishable bread of the earthly pilgrimage. But if they share this bread with one another, they shall also one day receive the imperishable bread together in the Father's house.”
In that vein, I want to share with you a bit of baking advice I gave my teammate that will help you avert your next cake baking disaster.
Parchment Paper FTW (again)
We’ve all experienced it before: You put all kinds of work into preparing a bake, but once it’s finished you can’t safely get it out of the pan without tearing it—ruining all your hard work.
So, here’s a trick I learned from Alton Brown to help you get your cakes out of the pan in one piece. As always, the answer is parchment paper.
Take a piece of parchment larger than the cake pan and fold it in half. Turn it and fold it in half again. Fold it in half again. Fold once more. You should be holding a triangle that looks like a paper airplane. Hold it up to the bottom of your cake tin with the tip at the center (or just eyeball-it like I do), then cut to fit.
Unfold, and you should have a nice circle of parchment.
Butter your tin, put down the parchment, then butter over the parchment too. It should fit nice and snug, and when it comes time to remove the cake, it will be a breeze. Don’t forget to remove the parchment before you ice it!
I love this!