Professional Bakers Are Lopsided and Burnt to Shit

Being a professional baker is far from genteel. It's not all pastel-coloured utensils, KitchenAids, and making sachertortes in summer gardens—there's a whole host of other shit to contend with that never appears on shows like The Great British Bake Off. Swap the cutesy bunting for burns, Mel and Sue's droll asides for the kind of cursing that'd make your mum slap you round the face, and you almost have my experience of working in a Yorkshire bakery for a year.

Despite idyllic visions of kneading my way into a floury cleavaged future, one defined by a loving, deeply reciprocal relationship with yeast, I couldn't hack being a baker. It's too fucking hard. Seeing as proper bakers just get on with their jobs and rarely complain themselves, I'm going to do it for them now that I'm out of the cake race. Here are some of the pitfalls of the trade that no one warns you about, and ones that certainly don't find their way into primetime television.

Lopsided buffness Whisking gallons of double cream in a bowl as big as a baby elephant and lifting heavy machinery meant that my right bicep was soon much bigger than my left one. I mentioned this once to a colleague who replied, "Oh, that's nothing. Just wait until your sleeve stops fitting on one arm and you have to buy a bigger size to accommodate it." This is not something people warn you about. I wasn't keen on looking like a lopsided Incredible Hulk and decided to balance out my uneven muscle growth. I started to use my left arm to scrape down the thick cake batter in a dishwasher-sized mixing bowl, which, needless to say, was an ineffective move. It was like asking a baby to stir a bucket of cold porridge with a chopstick.

Needing the local burns unit on speed-dial My muscular arm got burnt. A lot. No matter how many oven mitts I used and how careful I was, a new burn was always just around the corner, guaranteeing a steady stream of expletives that would live forever in the bakery walls. Each new pastry was poisoned by my profanities. Some of the burn lines I got from pulling searing hot baking trays out of the oven removed strips of skin on the underside of my forearm, down to the subcutaneous layer. The scars healed eventually but will never disappear. One of the the younger girls I worked with absentmindedly put her hand inside the oven to remove a hot pastry tin without using a mitt once. Her screams will live in my bones until the day I die.

Calluses and skin conditions Rolling out pastry is therapeutic, yes, if you're doing it for half an hour. Try rolling out sweet pastry crust and pie tops for four hours in a row every day of the working week and you'll be in need of therapy. After a few months I'd developed thick, alien calluses at the base of my fingers from the pressure of using a rolling pin, and a general coarseness on my upper limbs due to all the flour. I had the hands of a builder; custard was my mortar and meringue my bricks. The repetitive act of rolling pastry and lining tins all morning did provided me with the time to ponder life's important questions, though, like, whatever happened to Brad from Neighbours?

Turd-like footwear Chocolate pudding might be delicious, but it looks like turd when you get it on your shoes. My work trainers were caked with a sickly-sweet mix of pudding batter, toffee sauce, and cocoa. They looked crusty on the surface and felt grainy inside, and my white laces became as brown and as wet as Puy lentil soup. I looked like I was wearing cowpats that had bruléed by the sun for a few days and it's a genuine miracle that I didn't get the kind of fungal foot infection that lands you in medical textbooks.

Continuous cleaning Anyone who works in a professional kitchen will tell you that cleaning is something you cannot shirk. Being able to clean well is a prerequisite of the culinary world, and, just like chefs pour boiling water over their stove tops at the end of service and scrub away congealed meat juices, fat spills, and water marks, the final hour of every day in the bakery was spent cleaning bowls and the crevices of mixers, washing tins, sweeping and mopping the floor, scrubbing the hob, and scouring utensils. It's a merciless, unforgiving level of cleaning that no domestic handbook could prepare you for and you have to do it because dried-out, congealed cake batter is like Kim Kardashian—after a certain point it doesn't go away, no matter how much you try. By the end of the day, that bakery was as hygienic as an intensive care ward.

You don't get to eat anything you make Eating the products was, and is often, not allowed. The truth is, though, that baking all day every day actually turns you off. The thought of consuming anything sugary after a day spent working in sickly sweet cloud of frangipane, chocolate, and golden syrup made me feel queasy. I'm not sure I could ever look chocolate cake fully in the eye again after taste-testing two metres of domino-like slices of the stuff. I was like a brown, highly nauseated Mary Berry.

Unwanted weight loss This will not be the case for everyone, but I went down four dress sizes during my year as a baker, ended up as a bony UK size four. I would eat whatever I wanted and never went to the gym but, because I was on my feet all day and basically doing HIT training with a cream whisk (the sweat I produced could have filled the 02 Arena twice over), I inadvertently lost a lot of weight that I didn't really need to lose. Every belt I had was too big, my hips had vanished and my face looked like Skeletor from He-Man. When the compliments turned into concern I realised that something had to change and I eventually left my job to get a qualification in journalism.

My advice to budding bakers? Get some work experience first before busting your gut making gallons of ganache in a chrome-lined, windowless prison with the climate of a tropical rainforest for a pittance. Most importantly, though, never put a product in the bin—hide it from the boss or secretly eat it in the freezer.