The Baking Tip that Changed Everything

Am I the only one who didn’t know that you can use a food thermometer to check when baked goods are done? For years, I’ve been doing the toothpick check, which mostly worked OK, except when it didn’t.

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Like the time I was at a friend's barbecue - we cut into my homemade cornbread, only to find a gooey middle. Gooey might be okay for brownies, but it's definitely NOT okay for cornbread.

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Or the loaf of bread that was as dry as the Griswald family’s Christmas turkey. That one went straight to breadcrumbs, which is a highly disappointing alternative to soft, homemade bread 😩.

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But now, the toothpick test is mostly a thing of the past because one recipe taught me there was a more accurate, more convenient way, right in my junk drawer.

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I was making focaccia bread and the final step was, “use a food thermometer to check doneness (205°F). I googled to see if I could do the same for other baked goods, and here we are 🤯.

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It’s got me thinking: There are so many things that we learned early on that stick with us forever. They just become “the way we do things.” We don’t question them, look for other answers, or wonder if they’re really working.

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In life and in leadership - there may be better, simpler, faster ways available, but we won’t know about them unless someone/something else brings it into our awareness.

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It's one of my favorite things about being a leadership consultant - I'm invited into organizations to take a look around and see where there might be more effective ways for teams to work together.

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And sometimes, it's really simple things that make a big difference, but that are hard to see from the inside when you're busy with the day-to-day work.

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One of my clients found using a teaming agreement to set expectations at the beginning of a meeting super helpful for minimizing disruptions and sticking to the agenda. Their meetings became much more productive, and once it was established, all they had to do was rinse and repeat.

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Another found that creating an outline to plan for difficult employee feedback conversations helped her feel more grounded and confident so conversations happened quicker and flowed more easily - a process she had no idea she needed!

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In a world where we are constantly bombarded with the latest and greatest solutions, it can be hard to discern what’s actually useful.

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But, sometimes, we stumble upon info that proves to be effective and that can quickly shift how we do things.

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And that’s worth sharing.