Baking and patisserie

Bakers’ German reaches well beyond the bakery, and the clearest case stands at the end of this list: kleine Brötchen backen. Literally it means baking small rolls; in a meeting or a newspaper it means lowering one’s sights — a firm after a bad year, a club after relegation, a council whose plan has been cut back to what the budget allows. It is neither an insult nor a joke, simply a sober admission that the ambitious version is off the table, and it takes the comparative easily: Wir müssen kleinere Brötchen backen. The same shelf holds a second idiom, seine Brötchen verdienen, to earn one’s living, much as English speaks of earning a crust. Everything else here is the trade itself, and it is exact where English is loose: one word, die Gare, for the state of the dough, and a compound of its own for every stage of it.