Hate -Love #4: Baking

I hate....

Baking. I can't quite put my finger on what it is about baking that I hate so much, but every time I consider it, a feeling of dread immediately washes over me. It's not that I'm bad at baking, I'm actually pretty good at it, but in a rare turn of events, baking is one of my strengths and still something I hate to do. Furthermore, I LOVE to cook, so the fact that I hate to bake has nothing to do with a special fear of my kitchen: I have no particular qualms about spending time hovering over my cooking appliances. Perhaps I don't like baking because of the way flour, like sand, gets EVERYWHERE, and inevitably turns into an immovable, cement-like paste that not only sticks to everything, but also infiltrates and ruins whatever sponge is used to try and remove said paste. The rule in my house is that when you cook for the other person (which I do almost every night) you don't have to clean, which makes cooking that much more enjoyable, but that rule goes right out the window when I bake. When I bake I am almost always either baking a gift for someone not in our household, a birthday cake, or a breakfast bread (like the one above) for myself. Because of this, baking means I lose the services of my chief dishwasher, leaving yours truly not only to re-paint the kitchen with cookie batter but also to have to clean the sticky, ooey-gooey mess all by my lonesome. Wah. yes, I know. Finally, baking means that I will most likely have baked goods around the house, and since they will probably be good, I will probably eat them, and then POOF before you know it, my poor boyfriend will have to wedge me into my jeans with a crow bar before I leave the house every day. So, naturally, I want to avoid THAT.

When I get over all these things, however,

I love...

The immense satisfaction that comes with giving someone something you baked yourself just for them. Giving someone home baked goodies is like giving them a little piece of your heart: even when you hate baking as much as I do, you can't help baking someone something yummy with lots of love, and people know that. When you bake someone something, they know that you didn't just go to the store and say, "Ok it's ____ holiday, what junk can I buy that ____ will like?" When you bake, however, the person on the receiving end knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that you went through the trouble not only to pick out a recipe, and buy all the stuff you need to whip up whatever confection you've chosen, but also through the painstaking process of chopping, mixing, whipping, pouring, buttering, melting, and drizzling that baking requires. That's not to say that there aren't wonderful gifts that you can buy in a store, but baking is unquestionably a labor of love. Nothing beats a homemade birthday cake (or birthday pie in the case of the pie in the picture above that my amazing mother made me for my 22nd birthday), or your favorite cookies made just for you (like the ones I made for my Dad for father's day this past weekend). So though baking may suck, the end result- totally worth it!