The pandemic...
How I actually started to cook
Hello and welcome to Not a Vegetarian. I’m Jack Faulkner, and ever since reviving my love of cooking five years ago I’ve been muddling my way through the world of food. Every week I share a different story from my culinary journey, from nostalgic cheese straws to thinking that I could make poached meringues after watching an episode of MasterChef.
This is the second part of a series I’m going to call How I Got Into Cooking, where I’m documenting exactly how I found my love of cooking, from my childhood to the modern day.
If you want to read last week’s issue about my nostalgic cheese straws, go here.
Honestly, I can’t believe we’re still talking about the pandemic today, but here we are. As it was a horrible time for many, I’m quite embarrassed to admit that there were some aspects I enjoyed. I liked being able to spend lots of time with my family and not have the pressures of work and, truth be told, it’s where I revived my love of cooking today.
It’s a story of rediscovered love, messiness, and quite a few boxes of cake mix. Thanks for being here!
After leaving the comfort of my family to go out into the big wide world, I had gotten out of the habit of cooking and mainly lived off a diet of ready meals and very easy cooked meals, like pasta with shop-bought sauce. So naturally when the pandemic hit and the cost of living shot up I wanted to stop eating extortionate takeaways and start cooking and growing my own food.
Unfortunately, this came with limited success. On the growing side, I did indeed proceed to buy lots of seeds from the local garden centre, most notably raspberries, sweet peas, lettuce and tomatoes. Planting them very well, if I do say so myself, I only found out 3 months later when it was time to harvest the tomatoes that my soil is too sandy to grow vegetables in. Oops.
Similarly, learning to cook wasn’t exactly as easy as buying a Jamie Oliver book and suddenly being able to make a 10-course banquet. After some trouble making soup that may or may not have involved fire, I decided that the best route to go down was to start trying to bake with cake mix.
My first cake wasn’t particularly great, but it didn’t cause a national emergency, so I decided to continue trying. But after a while, the quality didn’t seem to improve much, so because of my masculine ego I decided that it must be the cake mix at fault.
The new mix I tried was the Bakedin brownie kit, which still shows up in those annoying AI search results but I can’t seem to find a picture of it anywhere, so I’ll just show you a picture of a random cake because people now can’t seem to read for five minutes without either seeing a picture or the word “rizz”.
I digress. It turns out that the new cake mix actually did taste a lot better, which may have been because the other one contained more sodium benzoate than flour or just because it actually made brownies, not cakes, which are usually better.
In addition to their taste, I actually enjoyed making the brownies, too, which is always important when cooking. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see a way to progress from here, and I couldn’t spend the rest of my life only eating brownies. The solution I came up with was to sign up to the Bakedin Baking Club. Again, I can’t seem to find any website for it, but I actually found a picture this time.
The Bakedin Baking Club is a subscription service that delivers dried ingredients to your door every month along with a recipe reviewed by chef Michael Roux. I realise that that sentence sounds like an advert, but it’s not.
I figured that this would be a good way to learn different techniques and improve my baking ability, and, actually, for the first few months it was great. I remember learning how to make meringue, caramel, raspberry jam, and lots more as well, though hopefully not in the same dish.
However, the real problem was that I was spending £15 a month baking incredible pies and cakes when I was still eating ready meals for tea. Something had to change. It was time to transition on to savoury meals.
With that last bit sounding so dramatic, I’m embarrassed to say that I have no recollection of what my first actual meal was, but rest assured that it definitely did happen. It was probably something like a vegetable pasta sauce (because don’t forget that I was vegetarian at this point), but the details have unfortunately been lost to the sands of time.
In honour of my baking kit years, I’ve created a recipe for something that was always a favourite when the dried ingredients for it arrived through the post - banana bread, made a little bit more fancy by my slightly more experienced present self.
If you’ve ever had Biscoff biscuits, you’ve had speculoos. It’s that subtly warming spice mix, popular in the Netherlands, that’s made from a variety of spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg. As I have Dutch family, the walls of my house were always lined up with tins of speculoos, though they were rarely used. This recipe in particular is a great twist on the classic banana bread, which should be dense, sticky and sweet, and is only made better with the addition of the wonderful speculoos spice blend.
Ingredients
4 bananas (the riper the better)
2 eggs
230g/8oz self-raising flour
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
115g/4oz unsalted butter
115/4oz + 1tsp demerara sugar
1½ tsp speculaaskruiden* (speculoos spice mix)
Method
Mash the bananas in a bowl with ½tsp speculaaskruiden and 1tsp demerara sugar depending on preference. As I don’t like raw bananas myself, I prefer it smooth.
Using an electric whisk, mix the sugar and butter until smooth.
Using a fork, stir in the mashed bananas and eggs.
Then, switch to a knife and fold in the flour, bicarbonate, and the rest of the speculaaskruiden. Mix until smooth and everything is combined.
Grease a loaf tin and pour in the mixture.
Bake at 180°C/160°C fan for about an hour.
This recipe costs about £1.34 for one cake.
If you can’t find any speculaaskruiden, that’s totally understandable. It’s hard to find an authentic recipe, but these are the ingredients in my Dutch blend:
Sri Lankan cinnamon
Ground coriander
Ground star anise
Pink pepper
Lemon zest
Ground ginger
Ground nutmeg
Ground chilli
Ground cardamom
Mix them together in varying proportions based on preference, and then congratulations! Whether you can pronounce it or not, you just made your own speculaaskruiden!
After writing this article and being confused by Bakedin’s situation, I decided to look into it a bit more. It turns out that they went into administration in May 2023 and were acquired by a company called Treat Kitchen, which still offers some of the original Bakedin-brand baking kits, probably causing some of the confusion. It also looks like you can still order the baking boxes via a third-party website but I wouldn’t be able to confirm their legitimacy.
Thank you for reading this week’s edition of Not a Vegetarian. Next week, I’m talking about the one thing I could never make, even as my cooking knowledge started to grow - panna cotta. I still don’t know how it’ll turn out, so definitely stay tuned for that!
Also, I’d love to hear your experiences of eating in the pandemic, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment!
And, as always, if you’ve enjoyed this post, subscribing would mean the world to me.
See you next week, and thanks for reading!
I really enjoyed your article. I remember Bakedin well. Thank you for mentioning both your successes and failures, I like your honesty.
Thanks Jack! If I could say I like the way you’ve compiled this piece. Nice work!