Baking
I am suddenly quite addicted to baking. In the past couple of weeks, I have made cardamom chocolate chip cookies, whole wheat apple muffins, chocolate spice cookies, iced pumpkin cookies and chocolate cookies with chocolate chips and a chocolate peppermint glaze (a Nigella recipe). I am trying to stop myself from baking pear ginger muffins and cowboy cookies today. It's not that I'm craving baked goods - I don't actually eat very much of what I make. I bring the baked goods to Mike, work, my neighbors upstairs. I find the process quite meditative and relaxing, and I feel accomplished when there's suddenly a plate of a finished product in front of me. It's not like the other messiness of life, unfinished projects in my apartment, confusion and indecision with living situations and the real estate market and whether or not I will be in New York in a year. It's not like my writing, something I've been doing a lot more of since June (because of my fiction and poetry workshops) but without a lot of satisfaction in the final (if there can be such a definitive term) product. Even if I am happy with and proud of a piece I submit to my workshop, ten women ten years younger than I dissect it and take out every piece that matters to me and I am left feeling like an outsider who doesn't belong in their little intellectual club.
Baking is different. There is absolutely a spiritual side of it. I love the process, the slowness of it, the patience, feeling the dough on my hands. I don't have electric mixers, and I only have about a foot of counterspace in my small NY apartment (meaning the bowl of the flour, cocoa and baking powder sits resting on my TV while I combine sugars, eggs and butter on the counter). My oven is half the size of a normal oven. And somehow, still, I love it.
Perhaps I need to figure out a way to make this a small business - even just start selling grad students cookies on the cheap from my desk at work.
Baking is different. There is absolutely a spiritual side of it. I love the process, the slowness of it, the patience, feeling the dough on my hands. I don't have electric mixers, and I only have about a foot of counterspace in my small NY apartment (meaning the bowl of the flour, cocoa and baking powder sits resting on my TV while I combine sugars, eggs and butter on the counter). My oven is half the size of a normal oven. And somehow, still, I love it.
Perhaps I need to figure out a way to make this a small business - even just start selling grad students cookies on the cheap from my desk at work.