Baking With Jill
The best part of baking is of course getting to eat the delicious treat at the end, but there is so much more to it than that. Growing up, I remember never really caring much for baking and I probably just didn’t have enough patience for it at the time. So I would just let my Mom or Sister do it, and just enjoy the treat. However, as I got older, I found cooking and baking of any kind really fun and relaxing. You get to try out all these great recipes and play around with ingredients and create something wonderful and delicious. This in turn comes with a sense of pride you might not have thought would come with cooking or baking - plus you just get to eat really good food!
When I first started cooking / baking, I was in High School and through my School District I had a Vision Teacher who doubled as an Independent Living Skills instructor. He worked with me at least once a week on various life skills. He was a fantastic cook and passed his love of it onto me.
It sounds great, but it wasn’t always that way at the beginning. When I was first learning, like most people, it took some practice and I made quite a few mistakes along the way.
I remember one time when I was roasting almonds in the oven for some kind of dessert, I somehow had the cookie sheet unbalanced when I was putting it in the oven and spilt the almonds all over the open oven door. I was usually pretty good about putting things in the oven, so I was quite embarrassed. I also remember making cupcakes with my Mom. I have always had a hard time trying to put the batter into the paper liners, and the two of us tried so many ways to try and make it work. No matter what we tried, I always ended up spilling the batter all over the place and having the paper liners stick to my fingers. This is something I still struggle with, but I recently found out about silicone muffin liners that aren’t near as flimsy, so hopefully they will work much better. Keeping with the cupcake issues, I also have a difficult time trying to spread icing on the cupcakes. In fact, spreading anything is still a bit of an issue for me. There are so many tricks for spreading, you just have to figure out what works best for you, and it’s something I am still working on.
Regardless of my mistakes while cooking I still keep trying, simply because I love it! Cooking/ baking is one of those things where the more you try and the more you do, the more comfortable and better you will get. This is exactly what I did, and if I can do it, I know for a fact anyone can.
So when I was asked to help lead a Baking program with Blind Beginnings I was really excited! I had led the previous Independent Life Skills program in the summer and we had really good success with it, so we decided to take it one step further with a Baking program. All of Blind Beginnings’ programs had to go online because of the pandemic, so there were a lot of firsts for the organization, and it seemed like a good opportunity to try something new in the process. The time seemed to be right to try a cooking or baking life skills program.
I know what most people might be thinking, how we can possibly have a baking program online? Baking is so hands-on and how are we going to show youth who are blind or partially sighted how to do it? Well, we set a few things in place to make it easier and fun for everyone. If you are a child, we have asked that you have an adult with you during the session. We also send out information ahead of time about the session and include what we will be baking, the recipe we will be using, and what items and ingredients everyone will need. This is all in order to be organized, and above all else make it safe for all participants. We had our first session in September and we made brownies, which went very well. There was a great turn out, with multiple youth and their families, and we are hoping to have an equally good group of participants for this month’s session where we will be making homemade chocolate chip cookies.
by Jill Sloane