Admit it. You’re a panic baker too.

Posted on 26 September, 2017

Remember that time you sat down with a nice cup of tea and pile of foodie magazines and cookbooks?

And then, after perusing through a copy of Gourmet Traveller and giving the matter plenty of consideration, deciding to cook Yotam Ottolenghi’s 5000-step breakfast dish, “Aubergine, potato, tomato.”

How relaxing! NO, IT’S NOT. And you know it’s not. And the reason you know it’s not is because you’ve got a job or little kids or a gym session to go to and you don’t have EIGHT HOURS to spare to make this delicious nervous breakdown of a recipe. (My advice: Don’t be fooled by the simple-sounding title and don’t attempt this dish before your kids are high school.)

Panic baking. That’s what I’m talking about. This is the opposite of the slow food movement. Panic baking is not about cooking for joy. It’s about cooking because of anxiety and guilt, in a hurry and under pressure. Because you think you should. Because you don’t want to look like a terrible mother/bad friend/crappy neighbour. Because everyone thinks you haven’t got it together. But this amazing cake will prove them wrong.

After panic baking a pavlova with my kids the other day – the chooks are laying so many eggs, the kitchen looks like a ball pit – I found myself with 2.3 seconds to think. What a luxury. Then I realised that panic baking has three distinct incarnations:

Number One: Frugal panic baking

Firstly, one might panic bake when you have too much of something. Eggs. Carrots. Squishy bananas. This type of panic baking harks back to our frugal grandmas, so it has the advantage of a nostalgic glow.

Number Two: Guilt panic baking

Secondly, one might panic bake to seem like a good parent – feeding that endless, frightening beast that is school fundraising. This type of panic baking works equally well to assuage all types of guilt. And it’s my personal favourite because my heritage is Jewish-Catholic, so I have double the guilt of everyone else and therefore need to employ this type of panic baking often.

Number three: Avoidance panic baking

Thirdly, one might panic bake when you have something massive to do…like write a report or an article. Instead of doing said task, you hit the kitchen (also known as ‘procrastibaking‘). This is by far the most popular type of panic baking because who WOULDN’T want to bake chocolate chip cookies – and then eat all the raw mixture – rather than actually study for an exam?

Now before you write me off as totally insane, please note I’m not alone in panic baking. When I posted about panic baking in Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb’s Facebook group “Chat 10 Looks 3,” my post attracted 233 likes and a bucket load of sympathetic comments.

Carney, for example, is a firm believer in panic baking. She goes for method Number One: “I tend to think of the baking when you have a glut of something as a throwback to my grandparents who grew up with rationing and so consequently my mother, and now me, can never throw anything out. I’m glad to hear other people do it too!”

Ainslie, on the other hand, is more of an adherent to method Number Two. She explained on that very morning, she was making “panic honey joys” for the school fete at 1 am. Oh yes, Ainslie. Who hasn’t been there?!

Likewise, Heather posted a picture of three amazing cakes and confessed she “panic baked just yesterday because I was missing my five-year-old’s first sports’ carnival! Cake stall didn’t know what hit ’em!”

Heather’s cakes

Somewhat alarmingly, Hannah wrote about panic baking in an actual crisis.

“My neighbour had an intruder in her bedroom. I baked a banana cake at 3am while we waited for the police,” she posted.

In case you are worried, Hannah went on to explain her neighbour was “shaken, but only had things stolen, nothing worse.”

Luckily, there was fresh banana bread to scoff as comfort food. Thank goodness for panic baking.

For Jodie’s part, she was just glad to have stumbled on this new form of wasting time (method Number Three). She wrote: “I’ve been searching for a way to up-level my procrastination.”

No problem, Jodie. Only too happy to help.