Alright y’all, so last week my friend texted me and requested that I start a baking series on Instagram. She said it’s purely for her own entertainment because she just loves to watch baking videos (and make fun of me.) The only problem is I’m not a baker… or a video maker.
Now, I did try baking sourdough for a hot second to see what all the hype was about with that. I even made my own starter from scratch, and a friend also gave me some of hers as a backup in case mine failed. (But it didn’t, thank you very much!)
At the time, I was still very much in the thick of early postpartum when I delusionally convinced myself that sourdough would be a fun new hobby to start. As if I didn’t already have enough tiny creatures to take care of between a newborn baby and all of our pets, I now had two active jars of sourdough goop taking up counterspace and demanding my attention every night too.
Long story short: in a fit of postpartum rage, I dumped every mason jar of starter (RIP Doughey Tribbiani and Breadward Cullen) and discard I had into the woods and never looked back. So shoutout to all you sourdough gurus… it just could never be me.
Anyhoo, I digress. Although the whole sourdough thing wasn’t fun for me, I do find great joy in sweet treats. So after pondering the idea of a baking series, I thought, why the heck not? This is exactly the kind of shenanigans I should be getting myself into on a random weekday now that I’m a stay-at-home mom.
So I asked my friend if she had any baking requests and she said, “the viral dot cake.” At first, I thought she was punking me because she knows I have trypophobia and clusters of small dots make my skin crawl. Not to mention, I must be very behind on the trends because I had somehow never seen a dot cake before. My friend sent me an Instagram DM of someone making one, and of course, my entire algorithm then shifted and my feed was suddenly nothing but dot cakes.
I decided to make an exception and conquer my dots fear with a little exposure therapy and a baking sesh. So for the inaugural debut of my Baking with a Baby series, I attempted a Piña Colada Dot Cake and made a Viral Dot Cake Highlight Reel on Instagram to document the chaos.
And as it turns out, I actually had a lot of fun. So I think this may officially become a weekly thing: me attempting to learn how to bake things (with my baby)! I am now accepting baking requests (as long as it doesn’t involve sourdough.)