Baking with Pride involves a lot of baking with color; seriously, stock up on gel food coloring if you plan on baking much out of this book. Janusz Domagala was one of the fan-favorites on a recent season of Great British Bake Off, and his book is out just in time for Pride month; not a coincidence, as Janusz sort of quietly advocated for LGBTQ causes his whole season (watch his shirts). Every other recipe or two page has factoids about LGBTQ history, or some extra little baking tidbit that might be useful. Most of what is in here is cake, but there’s also an assortment of other interesting things, like some cookies, pastries, and other goodies. Janusz is Polish, so there are a few nods to that heritage in here, and one I was pretty excited to try, the poppy seed roll-cake. It’s a traditional Polish holiday thing, and my Polish aunt makes something similar every year at Christmas. Turns out it’s fairly doable, although I don’t think I soaked the poppy seed quite enough, and I didn’t get a great rise on the dough (resulting in the split you can sort of see on the right side), but I was using kind of older yeast. I also did not have red food coloring to do the buttercream poppies; I used orange because my gel color set was of the neon variety, and I just gave the roll a light top-coat since I don’t do very well with fancy decorating, and there really are not detailed instructions on how to do the flowers. For funsies, I may also have added Peep-bunny sprinkles.
I think the next thing I want to try is one the British side, basically it’s a cake-sized Jaffa cake (one of my favorite UK cookies. Basically, it’s a sponge layer, orange jello-layer (it says to use orange gelatin), and a chocolate mousse layer (vegan mousse too no less using aquafaba; the recipe is not vegan though, just to be clear).
There’s a lot of other things in here I’d like to try, like the honey cake and the pineapple cake, and the apple rosette tart. There’s definitely going to be a little more food coloring coming. I’m not going to aim for reproducing the pictures though, and considering that the decorating directions aren’t that detailed, I’m ok with that. I suspect the point is not accuracy, but colorful fun. Probably my only complaint is that there seem to be quite a few recipes that end up with leftover egg whites or yolks; that annoys me since storing things like that just takes up space unless you have immediate plans for it, and then you either have to find something to do with what you’ve got that doesn’t end up with different leftover parts that you actually want to eat and have room for keeping around. I don’t know about most people, but I don’t have room in my fridge for two full sized cakes, and as yummy as I’m sure that’d be, I don’t really want that kind of temptation around either.