We’ve all heard it a million times: baking is precise and cooking is loose. Cooking is jazz, baking is classical. Cooking has room to improvise, but with baking you have to follow the recipe to the letter.
This is, of course, nonsense. For one thing, you can’t control every variable every time. If baking required everything to be utterly precise, it would never work, because air temperature, pressure, and humidity all vary; you have to be able to work around those major variables. If it was true, you’d never see experienced bread bakers frown and throw another handful (or three) into the recipe. And most importantly, if this was true……how would we ever get new baked goods?
I think this is a mistake we make too often when we’re thinking about bringing light into dark times for each other. We think of it has having to be precise and perfect for it to work. If we’re not winning every struggle, we must be doing something wrong and should just quit. If we can’t come up with the perfect phrasing to offer comfort to worried or grieving friends and neighbors, why even try? Maybe tomorrow we’ll be warm and witty and precisely right. Or someone else can do it. Surely someone else has the right answer, and we can just use that.
So yeah, the lussekatter–you know what day it is–rose despite the plummeting temperature (and with it the plummeting humidity, oh physics why do you do us like this). They rose and rose and rose. Friends, they are mammoths. They are lusselejon this year. I forgot the egg glaze–I told you last year that I shouldn’t mention that remembering it was unusual, and ope, it was an omen, I did not put egg wash on. They are still great. They are still amazing. What they are not–what they don’t have to be–is perfect.
Last week one of my friends wrote to me to say that she’d made calzones but they’d turned out denser than usual. And you know what I thought? I thought, “Ooh, her family got calzones, I should make calzones one of these days!” And not in the “I’d do it better than that loser” way, either. Just: yay homemade calzones, what a treat. I watched her doing it. I remembered that I can do it too. Dense or not. Egg washed or not. Perfect or–let’s be real, perfect isn’t available, what we have is imperfect, and it turns out that’s what we need. Lighting one imperfect candle from another, all down the chain of us, until the light returns.
2024: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=4078
2023: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3875
2022: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3654
2021: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3366
2020: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2953
2019: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2654
2018: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2376
2017: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1995
2016: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1566
2015: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1141
2014: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=659
2013: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=260
2012: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/840172.html
2011: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/796053.html
2010: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/749157.html
2009: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/686911.html
2008: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/594595.html
2007: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/2007/12/12/ and https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/502729.html
2006: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/380798.html — the post that started it all! Lots more about the process and my own personal lussekatt philosophy here!…oh hey, this is the twentieth year I’ve posted about this. Huh. Huh. Well, isn’t that a thing.