childhood baking Words & Photoss by Jenny Payne
Over spring break, I did two very important things: I rewatched the movie “Waitress” & I said goodbye to my childhood home. If you’ve haven’t seen this 2007 comedy-drama, it tells the story of a sassy young Southern waitress, portrayed brilliantly by Keri Russell, who bakes the emotions of her awful life into beautiful pies that everyone loves. As a compulsive emotional baker now viewing the movie through my wise 18-year-old eyes, I couldn’t help saying to myself “I feel you, girl,” as I watched her close her eyes to invent pies for each stressful situation. This is where the two events connect: as I boxed away the contents of my room (full of some great treasures, i.e. a Labyrinth poster that clearly belongs on my dorm room wall, an old but still flavorful box of chocolate, many notes written to myself dating back to 2005), the melancholy of growing up hit me hard. This was really it. At the end of break I would leave this home, go back to New York, & return to a different home in August. It would never really be “going home” again, never with the comfort of coming back to a familiar place that had seen the same 18 years that I had. Upon my return to New York & arrival back on campus, I sat in bed in tears for three hours, unable to cope with the reality of growing up. Slowly I gathered the nerve to unpack my bags, & as I sifted through my carry-on my gaze landed on a hand mixer that I’d smuggled through security. Channeling Keri’s sassy waitress, I closed my eyes & imagined what I would bake my childhood into. Would it be a pie? Cookies? Running through my mental recipe box, I reached the perfect solution. & thus the compulsive emotional baking of rainbow cupcakes began. I’d like to claim rainbow cupcakes as my own, though I did see that some jerk chain bakery that will remain
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Spring 2012 | collegeandcook.com
unnamed recently stole this brilliant concept. If you think back to the scene in Mean Girls when the awkward girl says that she wishes she could “bake a cake filled with rainbows & smiles & everyone would eat it & be happy,” that is essentially what rainbow cupcakes are — except they are literally rainbow. There’s no joke here: they are multicolored bites of joy. Unfortunately, the cupcakes are a bit complicated to bake in a New York apartment-sized kitchen. After baking in my glorious kitchen back home (which it is absolutely normal to have dreams about) with all of my fancy baking tools & Yoshimi, my stand mixer (it’s also normal to name your kitchen appliances), I felt homesickness hit yet again as I mixed butter & sugar together in a pasta pot. I am a firm believer in baking with love as an actual ingredient — some things really don’t change from when you first bake cookies at age 4 — & so I forced the sadness out of my mind. The key moment of the rainbow cupcakes is dividing the batter into six containers & individually dyeing each one. This required that I get a little creative, telling myself that mugs, paper bowls, & jars would be just as good as symmetrically-sized containers. A moment of childhood nostalgia did kick in as I scooped spoonfuls of batter into the pan, a process that my mom once said reminded her of a little kid painting. The cupcakes remained in my room for a day while I tried to admire their beauty while I still could (remember, this is metaphorical baking). Friends came & took them even, & I worked on an extended metaphor that went something like: my childhood, like these rainbow cupcakes, once brought me joy, but it was short-lived; now I am a grown-up & a valuable adult & I can share that with real people instead. Despite my mature realization of that fact, I did still eat four rainbow cupcakes. Nostalgia makes you hungry.