ediblesf.com | 17 I wanted the Easy-Bake oven. As a child, I grew starry-eyed at the EasyBake ads interrupting my morning Nickelodeon. It wasn’t the glow of the teal plastic that drew me in, but the alchemy unfolding in fuzzy RGB. Butter, flour, and sugar entered a whirring plastic box and came out whole: a frosted chocolate cake, tucked into by the onscreen child actors who smeared chocolate around their mouths in glutinous bliss. I was sold. A couple of decades later, I’ve likely baked over 1000 cakes in standard oven ranges—just around 500 in the past year alone as a full-time baker. While I expand my daily technical baking knowledge (understanding the protein structure of flour and the Maillard reaction of browning butter), the juvenile shock of turning multiple ingredients into one item remains. But baking isn’t the magic disappearing act that the Easy-Bake oven made it out to be. Much to my chagrin, baking often produces more excess, more waste. Butter wrappers and single-use plastic piping bags fill my kitchen trash, eggshells overrun the compost bin, and lightly used cake boxes render sustainable sorting attempts moot due to their plastic coatings. I carry deep-rooted shame about food waste, from my upbringing and former professional experiences. I worked at a food waste recovery nonprofit in Alameda for a short stint, just shy of a year. We recovered thousands of pounds of food from the San Francisco and Oakland wholesale produce markets daily, alongside loads of ready-made meals and pantry items from local grocery stores in Temescal and Alameda. We’d sort through the haul, elbows deep in mushy produce, before allocating food to partner orgs who top up town fridges, curate and distribute grocery bags, and cook free hot meals. What we distributed each day was at the whim of the wholesale markets, depending on excess production, forgotten orders, or price gouging that left pallets of produce on loading docks to ripen and rot. One day, when the nonprofit’s Ford F-250 wouldn’t start, I tested the limits of my Volkswagen Golf hatchback, cramming ~30 boxes of ripe-smelling yellow zucchini over the Bay Bridge, ready to be sorted by the daily crew of volunteers. That same week, I delivered an $800 wedding order to a venue that cost half my annual salary to rent for the weekend’s festivities. The cakes I make are excessive. Sometimes loud in design and bogged down by muddled flavors, cakes marrying saffron-soaked chiffons with sage-infused custards, candied ginger and verbena frostings, and dandelion or beetroot dust to top. Blobby and brightly colored with fake dyes that certainly can’t have a nutritionist’s stamp of approval. Three-foot-wide sprawling monstrosities covered in flats on flats of organic strawberries, spending nearly $100 on decoration alone. So what’s a baker to do when egg prices skyrocket and rent is due? Ingredient costs drive prices, and trends impact commission requests. Excessiveness is almost inescapable, especially when it’s coated in buttercream and served on a plate. I’ll never be able to edit waste away like in a television ad or sell a slice that doesn’t come with a hidden cost—at least six waxed butter wrappers, three plastic piping bags, and one non-recyclable box for each cake. What I can do, however small, is value the produce and ingredients I’m handling and transform them into something that will be enjoyed, down to the last bite. I embrace the instinct from my produce-sorting days in my kitchen, thinking of delicious ways to upcycle neglected fruit and vegetables. The following recipe set is a come-as-you-are, or rather, bake-what-you-have guide, suggesting ways to turn excess ingredients or produce into sweet things to be savored and shared. “The cakes I make are excessive.” 1
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