Reviewed by Sarah Brew
There are many reasons to bake: to feed; to create; to impress; to nourish; to define ourselves; and, sometimes, it has to be said, to perfect. But often we bake to fill a hunger that would be better filled by a simple gesture from a dear one. We bake to love and be loved.
In 1966, Kathleen Eaden, cookery writer and wife of a supermarket magnate, published The Art of Baking, her guide to nurturing a family by creating the most exquisite pastries, biscuits and cakes.
Now, five amateur bakers are competing to become the New Mrs Eaden. There's Jenny, facing an empty nest now her family has flown; Claire, who has sacrificed her dreams for her daughter; Mike, trying to parent his two kids after his wife's death; Vicki, who has dropped everything to be at home with her baby boy; and Karen, perfect Karen, who knows what it's like to have nothing and is determined her façade shouldn't slip.
As unlikely alliances are forged and secrets rise to the surface, making the choicest choux bun seems the least of the contestants' problems. For they will learn - as Mrs Eaden did before them - that while perfection is possible in the kitchen, it's very much harder in life.
Today it's my pleasure to welcome journalist and author Sarah Vaughan to the blog so that we can find out a little more about her debut novel The Art of Baking Blind which is out now in Hardback and as an eBook and will be published next week in paperback.
Sarah Vaughan read English at Oxford and went on to become a journalist. After eleven years at the Guardian working as a news reporter, health correspondent and political correspondent, she started freelancing. Sarah lives near Cambridge with her husband and two small children.
You can connect with Sarah via the links below
Website: http://www.sarahvaughanauthor.com/
Twitter: @SVaughanAuthor
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SarahVaughanAuthor
There are many reasons to bake: to feed; to create; to impress; to nourish; to define ourselves; and, sometimes, it has to be said, to perfect. But often we bake to fill a hunger that would be better filled by a simple gesture from a dear one. We bake to love and be loved.
In 1966, Kathleen Eaden, cookery writer and wife of a supermarket magnate, published The Art of Baking, her guide to nurturing a family by creating the most exquisite pastries, biscuits and cakes.
Now, five amateur bakers are competing to become the New Mrs Eaden. There's Jenny, facing an empty nest now her family has flown; Claire, who has sacrificed her dreams for her daughter; Mike, trying to parent his two kids after his wife's death; Vicki, who has dropped everything to be at home with her baby boy; and Karen, perfect Karen, who knows what it's like to have nothing and is determined her façade shouldn't slip.
As unlikely alliances are forged and secrets rise to the surface, making the choicest choux bun seems the least of the contestants' problems. For they will learn - as Mrs Eaden did before them - that while perfection is possible in the kitchen, it's very much harder in life.
Can you tell us a little bit about your debut novel The Art of Baking Blind?
The Art of Baking Blind is about why we bake but it’s also about motherhood, nurture, the difference between appearance and reality, the importance of being loved and the impossibility of perfection. It follows five bakers who have entered a baking competition inspired by a 1960s cookery writer and early domestic goddess, Kathleen Eaden. Kathleen’s 1966 The Art of Baking implies that, if you make cakes, biscuits and bread as perfectly as she does, you will have the perfect family life. But as the competition progresses, we see the lives of the contestants unravel and we learn – through a series of flashbacks – that Kathleen’s life was hardly as perfect as it might appear.
As The Art of Baking Blind features multiple characters and the various stages of a baking competition, did you have to disciplined with plotting to keep track?
Yes. I knew from the start that the book would be structured around six stages of a baking competition that would provide natural peaks and, I hoped, some compulsion to continue reading. (Although, who wins the competition doesn’t really matter; like all novels it’s about the characters’ process of self-realisation.)
At 28,000 words I plotted each chapter and although there were extraneous characters that were later cut, and a couple of extra plot lines that came in, this helped me weave them all together. It also gave me the confidence to write to my now-agent, Lizzy Kremer, claiming that I knew what I was doing. (Though this wasn’t the case, at all.)
At one point, midway through the first draft, I drew up a huge grid, with the chapters along the top and the characters, including Kathleen, down the left hand side. I then pinpointed what each character was doing in each chapter so that I could get a sense of whether their stories were balanced in importance, and to check that they weren’t vying for attention all the time. Seeing it like this made it feel polyphonic: like a piece of Baroque music in which the different parts weave in and out.
Now that I’m completing my second novel, which involves two distinct, more fully-realised time lines, I am amazed that I thought I could write like this and that it wasn’t even more tightly structured from the start. But the fact that The Art of Baking Blind is largely written in the present day – and Kathleen’s sections are discrete – enabled me to do it like this.
