My mother and I have baked together for as long as I remember. When I was a small child, she would give me pieces of bread dough with which to play while she kneaded and shaped loaves. I would stick it onto the tops of silverware, pretending it was hair. The fork was a princess and the spoon was a prince.
When I got a bit older, I started to shape my own loaves — often choosing the likeness of some animal. I’d press a circle for a face and two long twisted pieces for ears. My mother would give my bunny bread raisins for eyes. An hour later, my masterpiece would emerge from the oven, misshapen, unrecognizable.
Even now, in my 30s, when I visit my mom, we bake. Bread, cinnamon rolls and always butter cookies. We sit around the kitchen table — the very same where I once played with silverware and shaped animals — and we decorate our cookies with colorful sprinkles or dollops of jam.
“Easy on the sprinkles,” my mom says as I dump entire canisters onto the baking sheets. Her cookies always look and taste better than mine. So does her bread and her cinnamon rolls, for that matter.
But it was never about that.