On Baking
It’s not just baking. It’s the kitchen.
My favorite place in the house, somewhere where I can feel my calm.
It is my sanctuary. My language.
One of the few places I can go where my mind and body agree to take a break.
Baking’s repetitiveness and structure help ease my chaotic mind, with a pinch of unpredictability to keep things exciting.
A place where I know that as long as I care, it will manifest in my food.
The comforting ritual of preheating the oven, wiping down the counter, and tying back my hair to commence the process has provided me with a pint-sized amount of control in a world where it is scarce.
And if I can share that calm steadiness in the form of baked goods, I will.
I will always take the opportunity to disappear into my kitchen for hours on end, music/comfort show playing in the background, ingredients laid out across the counter.
And always — always — people in mind to bake for.
I certainly did not start with confidence.
I started scared.
I started nervous.
I started absolutely uneducated.
And I definitely started impatient.
But I slowly learned that in what feels like a timer set for eternity, when the fidgeting begins, and it seems like nothing is happening — everything is.
I built patience with each failed recipe, attention, and care with each collapsed loaf.
I’ve thrown out pounds of ingredients.
I underbaked.
I overbaked.
I forgot the salt and destroyed the fermentation.
We all know that baking is just one large science experiment, and that seems to scare people; add a teaspoon more than called for, and you may have just blown the whole thing, or maybe that extra teaspoon is just what it needed.
But what if baking helped us outside the kitchen?
Image Credit : Georges Petetin, Nature morte tarte aux pommes (1991), photographed by Petetin. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.
Because maybe the most important thing to come out of baking has nothing to do with skill or expertise.
Maybe, just maybe, it introduces connection — a sweet something to base a community — from soul to soul, from kitchen to kitchen. The softening conversations that can happen over the oven, the communication sometimes folded in, without a word being said.
Behind each baked good is the present thought of you.
The time and effort handed over with every warm cookie.
The consideration in every layer.
Maybe it will build self-trust and confidence.
The baking process becoming second nature.
A muscle memory to understand the recipe — to adjust the measurements in a way that will harmonize with you, instead of staying strict to someone else's, like a rulebook meant to be followed.
That, transmitted to every other aspect of life.
No rulebook, merely alternative ingredients and a change of measurements for every outcome.
You build it.
Maybe the creativity will insert itself, producing in a way you’ve never felt.
You take the recipe in as your own, adding to and taking from.
Finding yourself thinking about baking an embarrassing percentage of the day, about all the new creations to blend.
Thinking through ratios while you’re driving.
Blending flavors in your head at the gym.
And just like that.
Something as simple as learning to brown butter for the first time becomes a new way of adapting. Of relating. Of figuring.
And then offering.
