Why I Like Baking (Writing Parallels)

I have not particularly been brought up in the kitchen peaking over someone's shoulder but I have found an appreciation for baking in the last handful of years. My grandmother has always been so good at baking and she always bakes something whenever we visit and there is something lovely about being greeted with something home-baked. I have never quite been able to explain why I enjoyed it so much.

My colleagues at my office jobs have affectionately proclaimed that I was their favourite student worker ever because I often would bring various cookies along with me when I showed up. It became a bit of a tradition and it was such a nice thing to be able to bring joy to people with something so relatively simple - and even something that I find rather soothing to make.

A couple of days ago, I had been eyeing the ever-ripening bananas that never seemed to get eaten. A thought struck me to make a banana bread to use them before they would just go into the trash uneaten. I had to improvise a bit with the lack of eggs in the house but I ended up with a delicious vegan banana bread that my family and I have been munching on for a couple of days. I looked at it this morning and a thought struck me. I had never quite been able to explain or capsulate why I found the process of baking rewarding and soothing but I think I might have cracked it now. It's a very personal reason and it might only be applicable to me. I know a lot of people can find it stressful to make stuff in the kitchen and I do also relate to that at times, more so with cooking than baking. But most times, I just feel at peace and proud when I'm done baking something. 

I think I like baking because it's like writing. Okay, I do realise that sentence sound a little weird but let me walk you through it. You start with ingredients, you follow a set of rules, usually leaning on a recipe but with experience you also learn to trust your gut and eye measure and when the process is finished, you have something to enjoy yourself and share with people that will hopefully bring them joy. Ingredients are your characters and your universe, the rules of mixing (such as wet ingredients first and then dry) act like your plot moving the process along, you write within a genre or possibly apply tropes, thus following a recipe of sorts and with more and more experience you get better and better to create something. In the end, you have your creation that you can enjoy and you can share it.

The type of baking I make usually result in one single thing (or many of the same thing if you're making cookies). It's mixing everything together and at most creating some glazing after the cake/cookies are done but always at a leisurely pace. It's a rewarding process to see everything come together and harmonise. It is a rather quick form of gratification. I'll spent a couple of hours in the kitchen, and often less than one hour. It's a nice little break away from sitting at screens and I get to use my hands.

I had a mission to bake a whole lot of stuff in December but unfortunately that fell flat in the midst of exam, post-exam exhaustion and a lot of dog time. I don't regret it but I did make one very nice thing on Christmas Eve Eve. I had gotten a recipe from an online friend from USA (her great-grandmother's recipe) and I tried them out. We have had old cookie cutters in our messy kitchen drawer with all the miscellaneous items for so long but it had been ages since I had tried them out. I honestly felt a bit like a kid again with giddiness rolling out the dough and pressing shapes into it. It was fun and cool to take just a handful of ingredients though the journey to become star-shaped (and others shapes like hearts, pigs and people) and delicious.

Some days, those attempts at new and unfamiliar creations fail and fall through but I have found that if I take the time not to stress and just enjoy the process then it usually turns out to be a success. I have handled different types of dough a moderate amount of times by now and I can usually feel out or even the ingredients a little if necessary. My biggest flaw still rests in mismatching the time in the oven, where I'll either pull something out too early in eagerness or have a lack of correlation between the outer and inner part of the cake. It might have something to do with the fact that by then the process is almost done and the work left to be done isn't something I can personally do or control. I just have to wait and check but as always rushing it doesn't do it any good.

I went through my phone in an attempt to find photos of my different baked goods and I found it the photographic evidence appallingly lacking. At first, I was a little annoyed because I wanted to show off my various of creations but then I reflected that it might be a good thing. I get too caught up in making or consuming the goods to think about photographing them. Photos are nice momentums to look back on but it's probably good I don't have that many as one of the reasons I enjoy baking is the distraction from my screens. Whenever, I've tried to record step-by-step with the mind of potentially making a recipe post it has always worsened the experience a little. It takes me out of the moment of working with my hands and just focusing on how the ingredients are coming together. 

Baking is good. Writing is good. They are both things that I enjoy immensely. They share a number of parallels that I never really considered before today. Maybe it just means that I like the process of creating something. I enjoy the process of being creative and I often thrive when I can shut of the rest of the world and just work on something with all of my focus. Whenever I'm writing and hammering away at the keys, my ears will not even registering the music I play in the background and I'm lost to the world and I hate being torn away while I'm in the flow. Whenever I'm baking, I'm pottering around, usually singing along to music and forgetting about all the stuff and things on my To-Do List at least for a moment. At the end of both processes, I have something I will enjoy, as I usually allow my own taste to dictate what I want to write or bake, but if I'm lucky someone else will enjoy it too.