Before moving to college—where the most cooking I do is reheating food in a microwave—I enjoyed cooking and baking often. No matter how a dish turns out, it’s satisfying to start out with a recipe, go through the stages of thinking “Is it supposed to look like that?” and end up with something to enjoy with family and friends. Even before being sent home from school to quarantine, I had done a fair amount of baking, but I mainly stayed in my comfort zone with brownies, cookies, and occasionally, more difficult recipes from scratch. I loved watching baking shows and was especially interested in cake decoration, but never thought I’d have the time or skills to really get into baking. Once I entered the chaos of my freshman year, I pretty much forgot about it besides making a few recipes over winter break with my family. I would never have expected a global pandemic to be the thing that pushed me to bake.
My baking journey at home started—as did that of many people—with banana bread. Tried and true, this baking staple seemed to be the go-to comfort food for almost everyone during this tough time and who can blame them? It’s delicious, comforting, and easy to make especially if you use a box mix. But I wanted to try more. As I spent my time between Zoom classes catching up on The Great British Bake Off, I decided I wanted to graduate from easy recipes and really try to master baking.
So I started baking, sometimes alone and sometimes as a family activity. My house was constantly filled with the smells of cakes, scones, and bread. I went from dreading the dystopian feeling of socially distanced grocery shopping to being distracted by my excitement to pick up ingredients for new recipes.
My birthday, which I had planned to spend with friends at Georgetown, turned into a mission to make a birthday cake on my own, and I loved it. Concentrating on the precision that baking requires made me forget about the bad news that bombarded my phone every day I woke up in quarantine. Creating the cake from scratch allowed me to experiment with different flavors, and though my decorating wasn’t intricate, I still felt so proud of it.
A few weeks later, Mother’s Day meant surprising my mom with one of her favorite desserts: lemon meringue pie. This also meant two firsts for me: pastry and meringue. These are two elements that often spell disaster for baking show contestants and intimidated me at first, but I was actually surprised by how well they turned out. As silly as it sounds, there is a certain sense of pride you feel seeing that lump of pastry finally come together and getting that perfect swirl on your meringue.
Cakes, tarts, pastries, bread, I love doing it all. There are so many more recipes I want to try, and I’m so glad I’ve had the opportunity to develop a hobby I really love and turned out to be pretty good at. I feel incredibly grateful to have had the resources to try to make the current situation into something somewhat enjoyable. I think this situation has led many of us to do things we otherwise would never have made time for. Though the constant influx of COVID-19 statistics is overwhelming, and it has been difficult worrying about family members who have lost jobs or been stuck abroad, baking has been a welcome distraction. Especially during the stress of online finals, baking gave me something to look forward to and a sense of accomplishment in a world of uncertainty.
This has also made me enjoy myself in the kitchen again, now that I’m not merely running to the dining hall to grab any food that looks decent or trying to find affordable options to eat out near campus. Taking the time to make things I really enjoy has made me rediscover my passion for an old hobby and realize that it’s not as difficult as I thought it was. Whether it be through baking, cooking, or even something non food-related, I think now is a great time for everyone to rekindle joy in a hobby they’ve lost time for, as we all try to make our way through this insane situation.
Even as things return to normal, I want to keep learning new skills. I want to learn how to pipe buttercream flowers, make puff pastry, and bake sourdough from scratch (ironically I still haven’t tried one of the biggest trends in quarantine baking). My state has recently started easing restrictions, and in all my dreams of where I would first go post-quarantine I did not expect to be buying a turning cake stand at Michael’s, but that’s how it turned out. While I’m still surrounded by uncertainty about when my state will fully open and whether I’ll be back on campus in the fall, I look forward to continuing to try new recipes and eventually sharing them with my friends and family as things return to normal.