It may just be possible that I have found the ultimate excuse to explain why my sons know me as the birthday cake butcher.

It wasn’t always so. In Ontario, I don’t recall having a problem with baking. It wasn’t until we moved to Calgary 19 years ago that I seemed to have lost the touch. Birthday cakes began to look like stretches of bad roads, and more often than not landed in the garbage, still in the pan they were stubbornly stuck to.

 My boys would plead with me to not bake them a cake. They found this amusing, but I can assure you that my ego was as deeply dented as most of my cake pans. Sunday dinners, determined to have Yorkshire puddings, became a lesson in political correctness and good manners. My popovers always came out like dense, over-done muffins.

            The first time I baked a cake on Gabriola, I knew that something was amiss. It was perfect and came out of the pans cleanly. Perhaps it was the humidity? I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going to argue with this blessing. And then I went back to Calgary; back to collapsed, crumbling messes, and my extravagant habit of tossing out the pan with the cake.

            If I had read my Joy of Cooking more carefully, I would have learned about high-altitude cooking. Cooking at any altitude over 3000 feet is considered high-altitude. Recipes are conventionally written to reflect cooking at low altitude. Gabriola has an altitude just high enough to keep our heads out of water. I grew up in Ontario where altitude was not quite that low, but still well in the low-altitude ballpark. When I moved to Calgary, I had no idea that the 3440 feet could affect baking and make me a standing joke with my sons.

            Atmospheric or barometric pressure decreases with increased altitude. This reduced pressure allows water to boil quicker, but at a lower temperature. Water boils at around 212ºF on Gabriola but at 203ºF in Calgary, which means that pasta or rice will take longer to cook in Calgary. Because I don’t pay much attention to how long I cook pasta or hard-boil eggs, I never really made a connection between differences in cooking times and geography.

            The more critical and noticeable difference for me is that with lower atmospheric pressure, leavening agents such as baking soda or powder, or beaten eggs, form gas-filled bubbles quicker and just keep rising until the cake explodes and falls. To correct this, I should have increased the oven temperature and bake my cake faster, preventing it from over-inflating. Accordingly, cooking time should be reduced to avoid burning at the higher temperature. Eggs should be used cold and only slightly beaten to reduce their leavening property. With increasing altitude, the amount of leavening agent needs to be reduced and flour increased to slow down the rising effect. Because high altitudes usually come hand-in-hand with dry climates (yikes, a double-bogey in Calgary), the liquid usually needs to be increased.

            My personal favourite piece of new knowledge is that cakes tend to stick and overflow at high altitudes. I am relishing the moment when I show this little tidbit to my scoffing sons.

            Anyone who has always lived at a high altitude and learned to bake there probably makes slight and subtle alterations to recipes without even being aware. If I had swallowed my pride and asked friends and family who had grown up in Calgary for baking advice, they would not likely even be aware of changes they make to recipes to get the best results. After 18 years of disasters, I was beginning to make some adjustments in recipes such as increasing baking temperature and experimenting with the amount of leavening I used. Unfortunately, I was going in the wrong direction. Because my baking usually came out flat, like a burst balloon, I made the erroneous assumption that I needed to add more. For the most part, I just avoided baking altogether, in response to unrelenting family pressure.

But I now live at sea level, which means that I may now be able to redeem my reputation. To test my theory, I tried Yorkshire puddings. I used the same recipe and pan that I have always used (and abused); the only difference was the oven and altitude. Attitude remained the same: sceptical.

            It was a miracle. I followed the recipe exactly and my puddings looked like the photo. They were a bit over done because after 18 years of Calgary baking, I had picked up the habit of automatically increasing my oven temperature when baking, a habit that I will now have to break. And, if it still seems that baking is just not my forté, I can always blame the UV index, phase of the moon, or the Nasdaq.