Increased domesticity is one of the obligatory symptoms of working from home and spending 90% of your time in your apartment, you actually start to shed the dormitory-induced inability to nest and start teaching yourself how to play house. You learn new things like how to jiggle your ancient toilet's handle perfectly until you hear the familiar ::plink:: You buy giant phallic squashes and cut them up and make soup out of them. And you stop being afraid to do things like bake, which I think I was for awhile.
That sounds totally weird - but understand, baking was always kind of an ominous female force in my family. I grew up in the most heteronormative (hi, I was a double major in Journalism and Gender & Sexuality Studies at NYU) household where mom raised kids and cooked and baked and cleaned and dad manually labored and brought home the money that made ends meet and I was the overacheiving first born daughter who did theater and school stuff and fought about curfews and when I could go on my first date while my brother played sports. There were many things that separated me from the female members of my family but it always manifested in baking, which was a central theme and the glue that brought together all family gatherings. My Mom, Gramma, Aunts, and cousin would bake DOZENS of different varieties of cookies for Christmas and New Year's, no less than five different types of pies for Thanksgiving, breads and more sweet treats for Easter, and specially tailored cakes for everyone's birthday. I always felt like the baking gene missed me, like every other lady in my fam tree was born with a whisk in her hand and the ability to bake from memory and I was some independent non-baking weirdo who no one would ever pass down recipe cards to or ever ask to bring cookies to supplement a tray.
But then I moved into my first apartment and something clicked. My roommate and I had a holiday party and I decided to make my own tray of cookies. They were such a hit (duh) that I made more for a friend's New Year's party. The rest is herstory as we say in the feminist biz. This Christmas my boyfriend answered my vegan baking goddess dreams
and gave me a gorgeous TANGERINE KitchenAid mixer,
the moneyshot of all
kitchens and the only appliance that's possibly more serious a gift
than a ring (in the words of one wide-eyed friend, "wow, you guys
really love each other") Being the woman-of-the-90s that I am, I think
that I thought I was supposed to take my cues from Annie in Father of the Bride
and freak out that my boyfriend gave me something to use in my kitchen,
but then I (and he) had to remind me that, um, this was something I
really wanted - fuck the rom com stereotype of not being able to bake
delicious treats and break glass ceilings all.at.the.same.time. And
also, what fembot hasn't picked up (subscribed to) Bust recently - reembracing domesticity is so the new feminist frontier! Come on. Where else would stuff like this come from? My baking gene wasn't ingrained but stumbled upon. It was Googled and substituted with organic whole wheat flour and ground flaxseeds and vegan chocolate chips, and it wasn't like what I had grown up observing and eating - (but it will probably be what my kiddies will one day munch on, and you'll be able to find the recipes on my Brooklyn-Mom-healthy-eating blog). My family can keep their Italian cookies, decadent pies, and rich cakes - I am a budding vegan baker in my own right. And hopefully they'll make some room at the table for something I've baked up one of these days.
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