Earlier this year, my friend Michelle came visiting for a weekend, and we played a little conversational game that I've come to think of as "10 of You." It goes like so: if there were 10 of you, what all would you do? Maybe it's just an alternative way of playing the "dream career" game, but for me, there are lots of careers I'd be willing to try--10 of You asks instead what your passions are. As most who know me might gather, one of my 10 would be to design multimedia full time--there are any number of careers that this might entail. The point isn't to fantasize about another job (or 9 others, as it were). The point is to think about the things that you'd give a life to, if you had 10 of them to give.
Anywho, another of my 10 me's would bake. And bake full time.
Every holiday season, I visit my family in Iowa, and for the week or so prior to JC's b'day, I do my shopping, wrapping, etc., like every other green-blooded American. But what I love to do during the season is to bake, as often as possible. I give plates of Xmas cookies as gifts, I do the desserts for most of the holiday meals, etc. I do probably 2-3 batches a day for a week solid, hundreds and hundreds of cookies, candies, etc.
There's an art and a science to it, and both appeal to me. I like the planning, the execution, the variety, the different combinations of ingredients, negotiating a recipe, figuring out how my three different baking sheets are going to mess with a particular batch, etc. Cleanup isn't especially fun, but that's about the only part of it that doesn't appeal to me on some level. For a good week or so, the kitchen becomes my personal space, in a way that it isn't for the rest of the year. While I'm working the oven, nothing else enters my world. I don't care about what I need to buy, who I need to see, where I need to be--none of that takes priority when I'm baking.
So yeah. Baking. That'd be one of my 10.
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