Why I bake
Runner's high but for those with a sweet tooth
Hocus Pocus 2 is playing on a different tab (diabolical move), Rachel Tashjian’s latest moved me to (almost) book a flight to Paris to eat a clementine, I’m deciding right in this moment “Opalite” is a bop, and I just took cold meds because turns out not slowing down has its drawbacks! But none of this is relevant to what I started writing about earlier this week: BAKING<3 If you can tell when the cold meds start to hit no you can’t.
In the early 2010s you couldn’t turn on The Food Network, walk down a bustling street in a metropolitan area, or go on Pinterest without being inundated with cupcake propaganda. Today’s version of that phenomena would be protein—I prefer cupcakes, obviously. Between DC Cupcakes and Cupcake Wars and Magnolia Bakery and couples choosing cupcake towers over wedding cakes and Cupcakes and Cashmere (which was a fashion blog and had nothing to do with cupcakes) and Crumbs Bake Shop (remember Crumbs!!!) and Sprinkles (remember Sprinkles ATMs!!!!!!!), these sugary mountainous confections were everywhere.
There’s something veryyyy 2006 Marie Antoinette (you knew I was going there) about this spherical treat that fits in the palm of your hand. It’s easier to bake, and consume, than cake. It feels more feasible to be creative than it does with, once again, cake. Which all points to me, age 15ish, consuming all this cupcake content, becoming more eager by the day to be center stage in the kitchen instead of passively helping my mom and grandmom bake biscotti. Italian cookies got me interested in baking; cupcakes kept my feet firmly planted.
All throughout high school I was the cupcake girl in my family. Every holiday, especially the spring ones, and birthday and anniversary, people wanted cupcakes. I genuinely don’t remember baking anything else for, like, 4 years. I kept all the recipes I printed out in my own binder with notes in the margins—as any aspiring home baker does!—and reveled in my technique getting better with each carefully frosted treat.
The rest of the story unfolds like this: college, post grad craziness, c*vid. I didn’t not bake during/directly after college, but I can’t say I remember actively enjoying it, or making anything worth documenting, or challenging myself. We creatives all need space to stare at the wall and do nothing. So let’s go with that.
Slowly I started to find harmony with my KitchenAid again. Like pretty much everyone else in the spring and summer of 2020, I was watching a lot of cooking and baking content, catching up on episodes of The Great British Bake Off, and finding comfort in long days in the kitchen, where trying out longer recipes ‘just because’ made us all feel sanguine about the less than ideal circumstances transpiring. It was in the midst of this hair-pulling time that I remembered why I loved to bake in the first place. Because when so much of daily life keeps the uptight dial turned all the way up, baking is a blissfully tactile activity. Maybe I just feel that way because a lot of my job and creative pursuits (like this, lol) involve active brain participation and a lot of screen time. Not entirely a bad thing but it’s nice to switch on a different side of your imagination, one that doesn’t require such self awareness. You need to be focused when baking, sure, but honestly most of the time while taste testing or whisking or folding or yes, even measuring, I’m in a trance. A heightened trance; like when you’re driving and zone out on the highway while listening to Virgin but somehow get off at the right exit even in the middle of the “Favourite Daughter” bridge and still pull into the driveway completely unscathed. Kinda like that.
The turning of the leaves always puts me in my baking feels. Making pie crust by hand makes more sense when mornings are 50 degrees again. Galette especially makes more sense, even though it’s a seasonally agnostic dessert. There’s a lot of sentiment tied into why I bake, as there is with my favorite desserts to bake. In no particular order:
Alison Roman’s Lemony Turmeric Tea Cake. I think I made this 15 times between 2020-2021. Really unfussy and the perfect 3 pm treat with tea.
Any Thanksgiving pie. At some point in the last five years, I turned into someone who “plans” my pie menu. Thanksgiving is not my favorite food holiday but it is of course a favorite holiday for holiday’s sake. There’s always the lattice attempt, which I have yet to master but enjoy torturing myself to get perfect nonetheless. No specific recipe here but I love pairing traditional choices (pumpkin, pecan) with a quirky wildcard.
Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies. I won’t apologize for being sentimental over the most classic most foolproof most perfect in just about any form at any time of day or night sweet treat. If you don’t get mushy every time you flip over the bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips to peep the best recipe to ever do it there may be something wrong with you.
Claire Saffitz’s Cranberry-Pomegranate Mousse Pie. I’ve done the baking equivalent of hopping in trains planes and automobiles over snowy mountains and rough seas to get what I need for this Christmas Day pie every year. And no, you can’t stockpile fresh cranberries when the grocery stores start putting them out because they do in fact go bad very fast! That probably didn’t make any sense to you dear reader but just know baking this pie is always a whole production and headache inducing. I love it so much.
Birthday cakes. No explanation needed, although piping is never my friend.
If I keep writing about my love for baking I will hightail it to the nearest grocery store to buy ingredients for apple crisp and it’s 10 pm and I feel too groggy to do that and I think grocery stores are closed anyway, so ending here! I will leave you with this decadent photo of chocolate buttercream frosting:
THANK YOU FOR READING AND HAPPY WEEKEND. I’m going to go on Pinterest and search for comforting autumnal bakez, as you probably predicted.
ending on that chocolate buttercream was CRUEL