What you forgot about baking
even when you get to remember it daily
It is funny how much more we appreciate the moments happening to us when we remember them.
When we catch ourselves thinking back.
It has been a couple of years since I was a full-time cake artist. Seven years to be exact, and I am still reminiscing about it.
I’m still curiously waiting for the moment my brain tells me it cannot see one more cake. Not one more. Yet I still scroll eagerly, still catch the trends, still check the new techniques, the new products in the niche.
I ask myself both jokingly and in worry, how can someone be this obsessed with dessert?
And I guess that’s where my own question turns unfair. Because it is not just dessert.
If you are reading these lines, you are very likely a cake artist, a hobby baker or a pastry chef.
We are very alike, but we are also standing at two very opposite points of the same journey.
You are living it.
I am translating my memories about it.
I spend some days just thinking about the smells, the flavors, the resistance flour slowly builds in a batter, and how the right consistency felt on my whisk.
You on the other hand wear that freshly baked smell as a fragrance. You get to test-try cakes before handing them to customers, triple checking flavors with cake scraps and fillings for confidence and inner peace. And the moment you throw a batter together, you automatically stop whisking at the right second.
Like a 6th sense. No over-mixing. No second-guessing.
And you don’t even notice yourself doing it. It has become muscle memory.
Damn I miss those little superpowers.
The ones I used to overlook because my mind was always somewhere else.
Answer the email. But keep it short. Mix the batter. But do it quickly. Bake the cake. But make it perfectly. Skip the meal. You’ve got no time. Decorate it. But never be fully satisfied. Deliver it. But wish they would have just picked it up. Repeat.
That was my rhythm. And inside it, a lot of small things went completely unnoticed.
I miss my full inbox. The one that reminded me people loved my work enough to reach out.
I miss scraping my bowl clean with my favorite spatula. Spotless every time.
I miss the smell of a baked cake, and that precious second where your nose notices the exact moment it turned from batter into something.
I miss that expansive, nerve-racking feeling of starting with a fresh, smoothly scrapped, white canvas.
I miss the fact that I delivered dozens of cakes, and every single time, without fail, it was a short high followed by pure emptiness. And then the dread of having to start all over.
I miss even that. Which tells you something, I think.
The strangest one, if I’m honest, is vanilla extract.
Not the flavor. The smell, before it goes into anything. Straight from the bottle.
That moment when you uncap it and it hits you, and it smells almost aggressively of something good, something warm, something that belongs to a memory you can’t quite locate.
I used to use it so automatically I stopped smelling it. You open it, you measure it, you move on.
But every now and then something would catch me. A slower morning maybe, or a quieter order. And I would uncap the bottle and just… be there for a second. In whatever that smell is. Wherever it goes.
I never thought of those seconds as anything worth keeping. I kept them anyway, apparently. And I think you might be keeping things too, without knowing it yet.
None of this is advice.
It’s just a Monday morning and I’ve been thinking about kitchens. About the way they smell before the work starts. About vanilla extract. About watching a sponge rise like it was the most important thing happening anywhere.
Maybe go smell something you’ve stopped smelling. Or don’t. The work is waiting and that’s okay too.
But if you get a slow moment today -and I hope you get a slow moment today-maybe just let the kitchen be a kitchen for a little while before it has to be anything else.