After 18 minutes at 350 degrees, Sophomore Jodi Takeshita rushed to open her oven. As the aroma of the final batch of cupcakes greeted her, she finally completed her seemingly impossible task of baking 100 cupcakes in a day.
“It just cheers me up,” Takeshita said. “If I feel down, then I feel like baking, and it makes me feel better.”
Though such experiences can be stressful, Takeshita enjoys baking and the comfort it offers. She spends her weekends baking treats such as cookies and cakes, and she has also catered for her volleyball team, bringing them special chocolate cupcakes with cookies and cream frosting to their banquets.
“Baking for my friends is really nice,” Takeshita said. “They always ask me to bake for them, and when I do, they just seem so happy, and it makes me happy.”
Takeshita has baked for ten years, learning from the expertise of her grandmother and mother. She started off with sugar cookies that she could decorate before moving onto more ambitious projects.
“My grandma and I mostly baked from boxes and cake mix, but I wanted to start learning how to bake from scratch,” Takeshita said. “When I first baked them, they came out really dense, so I’m trying to learn how to alter the recipe so that they always come out fluffy.”
Takeshita intends to pursue a culinary career in the future, having already begun by catering to parties and selling her baked goods. She would like to get an education at Le Cordon Bleu Paris before fulfilling her dream of owning a bakery one day.
Like Takeshita, Freshman Annie Wu enjoys baking as a hobby. She specializes in macarons, having learned from YouTube and through trial and error with her friend Freshman Christy Yamasaki.
“I honestly love baking with Annie,” Yamasaki said.”She’s always a lot of fun to be with and baking is something we both enjoy, so it’s one of my favorite things to do in my free time.”
Some of her favorite things to bake are cupcakes and French macarons with almond flour. One of her more ambitious projects was baking a large lemon cake for her brother’s birthday, as the task required lots of planning and patience.
“For beginners, just keep trying,” Wu said. “When I first failed at making cupcakes, I just tried again, and I got them the second time. The bread part of the cupcake didn’t rise up at first.”
Wu embellishes her desserts to fit with the occasion. She has made Christmas-themed macarons with a snowflake pattern for her family gatherings and tennis themed treats for banquets.
“They’re well made. I’m jealous of her baking skills because she can actually bake well,” Junior Shirly Zhang said. “For the banquet, she baked macarons that were green with stripes, like tennis balls, that were vanilla flavored and really good.”
In the future, she wants to attempt creating a macaron tower after refining her skills.
TCHS School Newspaper