I feel the same way about baking as I do about poetry – can I call myself a baker, without cultivating countless hours, days, months, even years to the craft? Would following a recipe off of some website yield the same result as creating your own recipe from scratch? In all my years of baking for bake sales, birthday parties, potlucks, and picnics, never did I have the courage to create something entirely of my own.

But I’ve made baby steps, delineating from recipes necessary. Brown sugar instead of white sugar, single crust, as opposed to double. Maybe some white grape juice to the mango jam, if I’m feeling particularly rebellious. I myself was never a fan of canned pumpkin – the act of scooping out the stringy, orange pulp from a sugar pumpkin I’ve chosen, always made me feel like I could call the pie I’ve made my own, a conscious effort to break free from the rote reading of recipes.

Sometimes baking calls for lo-fi radio, sometimes it calls for classical, the subtle hymns matching the slow rise of the bread, the pie, or the cake. It’s better than a mere silence occasionally broken by erratic beats of a mixer coming to life.

But when I put my concoction in the oven, then comes the waiting. The wondering. The dread. What if I forgot to put in the butter? The correct cups of flour? The right number of eggs? Would all my efforts be in vain? I can never go by the recipe time these days. I check, and check, and check, until the toothpick comes out clean.

Perfectionism carries through in my writing, and especially so in baking. Though I stray little from recipes, the effort comes from the heart. In all my questioning about my status as a baker, I failed to see that baking is ultimately an intimate display of one’s love. The way one’s eyes light up after trying a piece of something I made, and the compliments that follow after, make every minute of my existential dilemma worthwhile.

I hope to share my writing to the world, in the same way I share slices of cake. But for now, I will settle for sharing the desserts that I love to bake.

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-Raisa Alexis Santos