Baking Is My Love Language

Here we are.  How are y’all holding up these days?  It’s been a while since I’ve published a post – y’all have to forgive me.  It’s not that I haven’t been baking, adventuring, or thinking about Shug and Spice.  Fact is, life’s been tough for me.  Grief, heartbreak, MBA + pandemic. More on all that later….I promise.

For better or worse, the last few months have given me an opportunity to reflect – to take a time out from my normal rat race and sit with all of my thoughts.  Sitting with all your own thoughts and feelings requires sitting in your own discomfort. It’s hard. It’s messy. I highly recommend it.  After all, living in fear of an invisible boogeyman is a cruel reminder of the fragility of it all.  The further away we shifted from the pre-pandemic world, the more I found myself grasping for something familiar. It took a global pandemic to remind me of something I’ve known for years…

I’m happier when I’m baking.  I’m in my flow when I’m in the kitchen. Baking is my love language.

A Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (that’s a mouthful) describes flow as a mental state of complete absorption in one’s current experience.  In this state, you feel productive, happy, and 100% focused on the task at hand.  In order words, this is your happy place.  The place where you’re so absorbed with what you’re doing that you look and the clock and realize you’ve forgotten to eat lunch.  Given how scary the world feels right now, it’s important to find your flow. Figure out what sets your soul on fire. Then keep doing it.

I feel like me when I’m in the kitchen. Baking is what I do. Baking is so deeply intertwined into my identity. I learned so much of what I know about baking from Mama.

It’s hard to remember a birthday or holiday without a scratch-made, beautifully decorated cake, compliments of Mama. Just recently, my sister and I found some of Mama’s specialty cake pans tucked away in the back of the pantry. She had one pan in the shape of a cabbage patch kid, that she’d used for our birthdays when we were little. As a kid, I probably took this for granted. Homemade hand-decorated cakes were just commonplace. As an adult, I realize this was a labor of love. She’d stay up late waiting for the layers to cool, piping on the decorations, and washing up the dishes. I can picture her now, sitting on a barstool at the kitchen island, waiting for my sister and I to wake up and see the perfect cake she’d stayed up late to make. Baking is a love language.

So here’s to finding your flow, and enjoying all the sweetness in life.

With love, from Asheville,

Shug