Baking is reminder of the relationships we hold dear
Baking, for some, is the balm to the soul.
I didn’t always enjoy baking as much as I do now. Even as my skills grow, I’m a long way from being an expert baker. I’m not even the best among my colleagues. I feel a little sheepish when I write about baking now because it was just a few months ago that I, a grown adult, cried over making a Key lime pie. And who cares, anyway?
I hope, if you’re reading this, that you do. Because baking has taught me lessons I haven’t found anywhere else.
I spent the childhoods of my summer sequestered in the countryside, with little to do except watch the corn grow and the temperature rise. It was there that boredom led to my first cracks at baking.
It was there, in the summer after eighth grade, that I tried making cookies for the first time. My mom wouldn’t mind me raiding her cabinets, I figured, if she came home to a fresh batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
I hoisted her recipe book onto the countertop. The page for the cookies already had a sticky note on it. This was a message, I thought, that I should be making cookies.
It was only when I dumped two cups of milk into the batter — not half a cup — that I realized the message the universe had sent was a warning.
My first instinct was to call my grandma. She would know how I could salvage the disaster I had turned my batter into. A knife twisted in my stomach, a sickening recollection rushing back to me: she had died the prior month.
Well, I thought. I guess I better finish these. My cookies mushed together on the sheet and turned out more like cake than anything else. I tried cutting the cookie-cake monstrosity into cookiesized pieces and put them in the container we used for such confections. My mom came home, I thrust the container toward her and said “I made cookies!” They went in the garbage.
Here’s the sad thing: my second at
tempt, in which I added to the batter approximately two cups of candy mix-ins, was somehow worse. The cookies deflated into a toffee-like consistency the moment I pulled them from the oven and, again, the cookies went into the garbage.
As we spend more time alone, I find myself turning back to the baking I find so comforting today and wondering at the difference between eighth-grade me and the me of today. Experience, sure. Common sense — maybe a little.
See, the thing about baking is that there's really no point in going through the hassle unless you're doing it for somebody else. Sure, I can make a pie, but I don't really need an excuse to inhale slices of apple heaven when I can just buy a pint of ice cream and call it self-care.
The biggest difference between the me of yesteryear and the me of today is that I now have people to bake for. If it's somebody's birthday, I can make my cheesecake. If a friend's coming to visit, I can make banana bread. If I like what somebody else has baked, I can ask for the recipe and take a crack myself.
I like to think that every time I get a recipe right, my grandma is giving me a little round of applause for not ruining it so heinously as the first time. I know she got a chuckle out of my first tries.
So, now that I can't see those people I bake for, I bake because it reminds me of the times I could, and it's pretty difficult to be sad when you have a plate of fresh chocolate chip oatmeal cookies in front of you.
If you're feeling down, disoriented or otherwise adrift, remind yourself of the way life carries meaning. It doesn't have to be baking, but it should be something that reminds you of the happiness that, someday, we'll have to return to.
And maybe we shouldn't take that for granted.