Holiday baking is more extraordinary to me than holiday cooking. I make meals—thematic ones, special ones—whenever I get the urge. But I never make four or five spectacular desserts all at once unless it’s the high holidays or a significant birthday.
My idea is always to dazzle my loved ones with the ultimate selection of celebratory sweets. I mention, days in advance, what I’ll be making. I ask for opinions, I re-assess. My excitement grows in step with the intensity of my prep work. By the day before I have this dazzling current racing in my veins. But it’s a baker’s current, so it’s sensual but precise, detail-oriented, orchestral. Without expecting it, I develop expectations. Of golden-era television family togetherness and Instagrammable elation.
Sometimes, I wind up disappointed. Unlike my son, with whom I could have stayed home, my extended family doesn’t have room for dessert. Or they don’t care all that much what it tastes like—or what it looks like, or what ingredients and techniques it showcases. And why I chose it? That is a topic marked by urgency only for me. A cranberry flan tart with a shortbread crust that tastes like it contains all of the world’s butter in every bite. A lemon cake with whipped cream, studded with jewels of candied lemon peel. A ricotta pine nut galette, vivid with orange zest, sophisticated with resinous sweetness, and more interesting than any other cheesecake I’ve had. And chocolate sables with fleur de sel, crisp but astonishingly smooth. To the people at the table, this is food. To me, it is magic. And this pursuit of perfection I practice, whose goal is sensory awe? This is something in my lineage that started with me.
My disappointment winds up no match for my pride and wonderment. After all, the gathering and the people I will see are my pretext: the main event is the baking itself, and then the lush mouthfuls of something I came up with and created myself. (Though sometimes it’s Deb’s, David’s, or Shauna’s recipe.) The joy blossoms for good over the days that follow, as Anker and I indulge over breakfasts and snacktimes, displaying attentive delight so concordant you’d think we’re related.
That my desserts are, to me, better than any other ones I have ever eaten, is a simple truth, hard to share with others without getting the kind of look in response that suggests I am coming across as delusional. And yet what else could my baked goods be, if not the best I’ve had? I have strong convictions about how I wish to eat, fine-tuned senses, adequate technique, an ethos of only consuming the best natural foods I can find, and firm adherence to using as few ingredients as possible to get the job done. I make what I want to have made—it’s that simple. If I try something I love from a bakery, or something remarkable made by someone else, I go home and figure out how to make it, too. And then I nudge it my way, so that I like it better. This isn’t arrogance, it’s diligence plus self-knowledge. I can’t understand why more people don’t feel exactly the same way.
I have struggled over the years with the matter of reciprocity, though not in the way it is usually cause for struggle, but in reverse. I like cooking and baking for others, but I am rarely comfortable with others cooking and baking for me. My food journey has included difficult times, with anger at the table and processed food on it throughout my childhood, weight I kept putting on as a teenager, diets I couldn’t keep as a college student, and trouble digesting pretty much everything until I was nearly forty. I have found a way that works and it is intuitive and personal. It allows me great freedom and nearly boundless pleasure, but it sometimes falters when I’m out in the world, playing by others’ rules. In my own kitchen, on the other hand, I am a fish in water, an exile finally home. Sharing the magic that works through me here is one of my life’s highlights.
Back when I was an overweight teen, I used to swallow my feelings. Now I harness them when I bake. If someone had time-traveled back from now to then and showed that former me how I’d turn out one day—and what I’d have my own tender permission to make, eat, and say—they would have made a very scared, very lonely girl feel a lot better. But no one did, so I’m doing it now, one cake, tart, and batch of cookies at a time. Especially over the holidays, which invariably find that former version of me showing up, asking to be soothed.
Pictured at top are the desserts I made several days ago in celebration of Easter 2022. There was a lemon layer cake with whipped cream and candied lemon peel jewels, as well as a ricotta pine nut pie, both from my own recipes. I also made a cranberry version of these excellent flan bars plus a sea-salt spin on these phenomenal chocolate cookies, both inspired by Deb’s fantastic recipes on her acclaimed blog, Smitten Kitchen. The photos are all mine, somewhat hastily shot in daylight on the counter using mostly the Fuji.