Never Walked In High Heels

I never really realized how heavy an egg was until last week. As I put it to my friend yesterday when we were meeting for lunch, “I’ve always had people to crack eggs for me.”

This year, in a feeble effort to simulate Julie and Julia, my neighbor and I decided that we would start baking each Saturday. Four weeks into our challenge and we’ve thus far made Victoria sponge, carrot cake muffins, a diabetic coma inducing chocolate meringue (aka a gooey chocolate stack), Norwegian cinnamon rolls, and a much bigger mess on my kitchen table than I ever knew was possible. My neighbor will tell you otherwise but the mess is mostly due to my interactions. During our second week of baking I decided that this had to be a therapeutic activity rather than simply that of leisure. My mother tells me that this is proof that I’m adopted from a bunch of militant Germans.

Its not that my family isn’t so much of the baking type as it is my lack of life experience which make the idea of baking so novel. With being even semi dependent on other people comes a huge amount of both tactile and practical ignorance. People make you a cup of tea because it is either impossible or you’d kill yourself trying to make one. As a result, you don’t know how your kettle works, nor how long you steep your tea for, or why different people can take the same request (will you make me a cup of tea please) and have it come out totally differently. Don’t even think of asking my how my washing machine works, all I know is I can’t turn any of the knobs on it.

On Saturdays I am once transported back to my childhood. Actually, that cliché is incorrect as it suggests that I have experienced the sensations of baking before. I have never done anything remotely like baking before. When I go to sprinkle flour, I am still shocked at how cool it feels to the touch. I marvel at how easily it slips through my fingers. I get frightened every time I come within about one yard of even a butter knife, irrationally terrified of stabbing myself with it. And I still refuse to try and crack an egg. I can only see disaster coming out of any attempt of egg cracking. This is where my overly logical adult mind kicks in no matter how much I fight to be childlike. It I manage to crush an egg rather than crack it, I’ve done it wrong, ruining the whole thing. My adult mind should then logically tell me that the world will keep turning and there’s more eggs in the basket as it were, but my mind has yet to reach that level of maturity yet.

Learning how to crack an egg has become my newest goal. Each week my neighbor holds an egg out towards me, lovingly offering me an opportunity to challenge myself. And each week I shake my head, agreeing to watch her do it for another week. Watching someone else do it correctly doesn’t teach you half of what you learn by doing it badly yourself. And so I continue to be surprised by the weight of an egg, have no idea exactly what it takes to crack its shell, and always waiting for someone else to do it for me.