On Baking & Feelings
[my orange olive oil cake]
January always feels like the longest month. NYE feels like it was years away, somewhere in there I had a birthday, at some point we nearly went to war with Iran, Kobe and his daughter died. Just too much.
I have returned to baking. Yesterday I made this cake, but I used orange and did not include alcohol which I think adds a weird bitter edge this cake does not need. Olive oil cake is probably my favorite cake on earth and I only had made it once before, many lives ago. I had it first in a castle in Tuscany when I was the guest of a literary heiress and I never forgot it. I immediately made it once I got back home and I was amazed that it was actually rather easy to make. Back then I made vanilla cakes, red velvet cake, almond cake, plum pie, every cake imaginable (I tended to avoid classic chocolate cakes; while I love chocolate, I am not so big into it for cakes). I even had my own secret recipe for the best orange buttercream frosting. I loved baking. Never a cook, always a baker. I loved how baking was all about creating something beautiful and nonessential, a luxury art item almost that you could also consume. I liked that baking was mathematical, that involved following rules and respecting numbers, that it was unforgiving and precise. I’ve always liked formulas and equations—I live in fear of spontaneously throwing a bunch of ingredients in a pot and hoping for the best—and so baking was always something soothing and quite therapeutic for me.
I don’t know when I started exactly. I think around 2005, when I was 27 and in a bad relationship. I was stuck in LA taking a yoga teacher’s training course—I had been doing advanced yoga since I was a teenager and I thought I could teach it as a way of making money since I had already decided to be a writer—while my screenwriter boyfriend tried to make it big. We had both lived in New York and I missed it a lot. One day I found a Magnolia’s cupcake recipe online—like everyone who lived in New York in a certain era, I was hooked on their cupcakes—and I began making batches of the vanilla cupcakes. My boyfriend could not keep up. I’d wrap cupcakes in tissues and sneak them in my purse for those long six-hour yoga sessions where we were told repeatedly not to eat. In the bathroom, I would go in a stall and unwrap a cupcake and feel so superior in my rebellion. I realized around that time I was a good baker and so I moved on to cakes. It was a thing to do that was not writing and it was NOT mindless activity. You had to pay attention and you had to do it right. A wasted baked item is a nightmare, an abortion of eggs and sugar and flour meaningless and vulgar.
When I was a child my mother’s worst fear was my getting fat. She rarely baked and if she did it was from a box. I would look forward to it and live for licking the bowl clean of batter. She would look at me horrified, always on some Hollywood fad diet. My father would bring home danishes and bear claws and cinnamon buns from the grocery store and she would eye them like the enemy, breaking them all in pieces for us. I would find ways of sneaking more throughout the day. I was never fat and in fact too skinny most my childhood. She had the saddest pride in that.
Then around 2010 I found myself in another very serious and very bad relationship. We were stuck in Pennsylvania where we both taught at a small liberal arts college. The students loved their professors dating—he in the philosophy department, me in English. They had no idea that just blocks from their dorms, we’d be screaming and crying and throwing things and wanting to end everything, not just us, for us. It was a cursed union and neither of us could get out for a long time. He had a violent temper that came from his binge drinking. I had learned by then that it was no use to lock myself in the bedroom when he raged—he managed to break a door on my head, which caused me to walk around teaching with a red bump on my forehead that I actually blamed on yoga. I had also learned it was no use to try to run away from him, as he’d caught me—he was a great athlete and always so swift—and once threw me down a flight of stairs. I had spent the night at a neighborhood bed and breakfast where I claimed our apartment had flooded and my boyfriend was away. But I always went back to him and eventually the only tactic I was able to come up for coping with him—with us!—was baking.
I would spent my days off from teaching downloading the most complicated cake recipes I could find. Three-tier banana custard wedding cake, various twists on traditional tiramisu, rosewater and pistachio lavender spring cake, lemon honey crepe cake, black forest cake, an ancient fruitcake recipe. I would spend hours with my measuring cups and measuring spoons and let myself be covered in confectioner’s sugar and egg goo and cake flour, food coloring on my fingers, the scent of vanilla extract everywhere. I would lick the beaters on the hand mixer clean of their sticky batter and I’d hover of over the stove, waiting with the sort of patience I had in no other art. I’d let the creations cool and apply the icing like it meant life or death, and finally I’d put the thing on the cake stand and admire it. He’d come home eventually, the apartment thick with the smell of sugar, and he’d come into the kitchen where I’d be smiling in my apron next to the cake stand, and he’d groan, “Not another cake.” I’d cut him a slice and watch him enjoy it in spite of himself and the next week I’d be at it again. I averaged at a cake a week for a while; when things got bad, it was two cakes. He could not keep up and he would complain about it. “This is not healthy,” he’d say and the next week I’d make a paleo cheesecake just for him and he’d find another reason to find fault with it all. I’d take the leftovers and put them in the faculty break room and the professors would often comment that they were surprised to see I could bake. I didn’t seem like the type, they would often say.
I knew what they meant but I didn’t want to get into the fact that pain was the real impetus for my baking passion. If he and I had been happy, I doubt there would have been all those cakes. Usually it just looked like me in a dark kitchen, while he was at a poker night with his colleagues, hunched glumly over a dinner of heavily frosted carrot cake all by myself. I never liked eating them that much—I always preferred savory to sweet—but they were often mostly left to me, almost as a punishment.
He eventually stopped eating them altogether. And when I found myself throwing away half a rainbow angel food cake that none of us wanted, I realized I should probably stop.
I made one final cake for a Persian New Year celebration the next year when we lived in New Mexico. It was my best cake, citrusy and floral and creamy, a tough one to make as high altitude required some tricky adjustments.
I didn’t make a cake again til this week. And as I set the timers and slowly poured in the oil as I simultaneously whipped the eggs and sugar and vanilla extract, then added the dry mix of almond and cake flour and baking soda and baking powder and salt, I felt both a tension and peace that was familiar.
It’s a never good sign when you are baking, said a friend once who had finally figured it out.
Last night I poured over recipes for Japanese matcha cake and pineapple upside down cake and tart cherry turnovers until I fell asleep. I bought a new set of pans and a too-expensive zester. I woke up to a breakfast of leftover orange olive oil cake and thought while it tasted great, it also tasted of depression. Of letting go, of an all-encompassing melancholy, of the lonely beauty of things that you make when you know the one rule of living is that nothing ever lasts.