Today is Baking Day

I had a light day planned, so I baked today. And while I was working on my gluten-free almond pound cake, I started thinking.

There’s an awful lot of baking going on. An awful lot of cooking. A lot of Instagram pictures of breads and pastries and cakes, and a lot of my friends complaining about how much weight they’ve gained during quarantine. (They’re not alone here…) There’s even a meme making the rounds about how the buttons on your jeans are practicing social distancing.

Why so much baking?

As I asked myself this question, I realized I already knew. I knew because it had come up at, of all places, Weight Watchers (yes, I know it’s WW. I predate WW, and I will always call it Weight Watchers. Deal.)

During a discussion of how quarantine has been impacting us on the scale, I realized something.

This is unprecedented, right? Normally, when the excrement hits the rotating blades, we have some idea of how to respond. But Covid-19? This is new. This is new and it is fucking terrifying, and we have no idea how to respond or what to do or how to react.

We’re all reverting to our earliest training. All of us. Because we literally have no other way to cope with what’s happening around us. We are all of us, with very few exceptions, reverting to a single lesson learned when we were very small.

That the cookie will make the skinned knee all better.

That ice cream will make losing the big game a little easier to take.

That a bad day can be made a little better by an indulgent meal.

That food equals comfort.

Right now, we have no safety net. We have no guidance. No one, NO ONE, knows what they’re doing right now, the government is in denial, and the science news changes almost weekly. We’re in a contant state of flux, and there’s no end in sight.

But there’s ice cream. And there’s cake. And there’s fresh bread, and cookies, and while that won’t make things go away, it makes things feel a little better for a little while.

And you know what?

Go ahead. Eat the cake. Eat the ice cream.

Do what you need to, in order to make it through the day. Through the week. Through that next bump in the road when everything changes and we don’t know which way is up.

Go ahead, because we want to see you on the other side of this.

There will be another side of this. We’ll get through this.

We might all be wearing a larger size of jeans when we do, but you know what? We’ll be there.

And boy, will we have recipes to share.

(This one, by the way, is the Land O Lakes Gluten Free Vanilla pound cake, except with almond extract instead of vanilla. I use Bob’s Red Mill One to One gluten free flour blend.)