how to date a baker

Are you dating a baker?

Does your significant other enjoy making delicious desserts, rather than dinners?

Does your boyfriend or girlfriend bake elaborate cakes, delectable brownies, and perfect cookies, but then eat a frozen pizza for dinner?

If so, you may be dating a baker. Being a baker, I have some helpful tips for how to date one of us.


Keep a well-stocked pantry.
Flour! Butter! Sugar! Fine kosher salt (not coarse salt)! Semisweet chocolate chips! Keep these kinds of things around, and your baker will be drawn to your apartment like a bee to a field of wildflowers.

Learn to cook.
Many bakers don't cook. Cooking stresses us out with its wishy-washy imprecision. Chances are, if a baker is making a savory dish, it's not in the way that any normal cook would.

If you learn to cook, your baker will think you are awesome. You do something that the baker does not, and therefore are interesting. Since you cook, you also provide sustenance that a baker cannot provide for him or herself. If a baker is a monkey, you are like a banana tree. Basically, you are the best thing in the world.

Make sure your baker is not stressed.
Since baking well is fairly time consuming, some of us do it only when we have time, and many of us do it when we don't have time but are incredibly stressed. If your baker is making cookies at an illogical time, make sure to talk to him or her, to determine if something stressful is going on.

If you do so, your baker will think you are an incredibly sensitive and awesomely observant individual!

Also, don't be a dirtbag (general good advice for any relationship) by stressing your baker out on purpose just to get baked goods. I've never heard of anyone ever doing this, but I do wonder if it happens since so many bakers I know produce cookies when stressed. We are like some kind of oddly evolved animal with a TERRIBLE survival mechanism.

When purchasing baking things for your baker, use caution.
Baking is practically a science. The people who like it are precise about their ingredients and picky about their tools. If you want to get your baking significant other something for the kitchen, make sure to take requests before you go out and buy something. Otherwise, your baker will feel like a pirate who has received a not-very-piratey hat.

Follow these tips! Be good to your baker, and you can look forward to a relationship full of delicious cookies, amazing pies, and awesome cakes. Good luck!

cake spectrum

I like making cakes. Here is a picture of a cake I made one time.

Cakes are fun. I like everything about them, from designing the flavors to playing with the leftover batter in the sink like a five year old before I wash everything. Designing the flavors, though, is arguably more difficult than playing with batter in the sink. Luckily, people's taste in dessert generally follows their taste in normal food.

I tend to think of food as lying on a spectrum of low-fat and crunchy to high-fat and creamy.

Normal foods look like this:

Desserts look like this:

You can use someone's taste in normal foods and other desserts to figure out what they might like in a cake.

For example, my mom is a low-fat liking person who likes crunchy textures. This means she likes salads, hard candy, and crispy cookies like tuiles. Since there is no crunchy kind of cake, the kind of cake she likes is the lowest fat cake (sponge cake) with the least creamy frosting (Chantilly cream, a lightly sweetened whipped cream). If possible, it is great to dress it with fresh fruit.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, loves peanut butter based foods, as well as macaroni and cheese. In terms of cake, it is smart to get him a cake that is fairly higher-fat. However, I know he does not like completely creamy textures (he does not go for non-chocolate puddings such as creme brulee or panna cotta). So, I usually go with a torte or molten chocolate cake for him, with a chocolate ganache or a fruit glaze for contrast. I can also make a light chocolate sponge cake, but I have to fill it with a heavier frosting such as buttercream. German chocolate cake can also be a good compromise.

Cake math is really fun. Try asking your friends what food they like, and see if it corresponds to desserts! It actually works fairly often.