At the beginning of lockdown, empty supermarket shelves were a common sight. A lack of basic necessities; bread, pasta and the wildly reported panic buying of toilet roll. The country adapted to our new life and shelves seemed to look relatively normal. However, that is not the case if you need baking supplies. Butter, sugar and flour are scarce. Looking on social media it made sense. Everyone is baking. As soon as lockdown was announced the nation raced to the kitchen.
I was one of those people. I spent the first week of lockdown obsessively baking as I was coming to terms with our new world. Finding a recipe, mixing the ingredients together, and having a finished product brought a sense of calm. In my everyday life, it was difficult to find the time to bake but now time is abundant I can finally work on those difficult recipes. In doing that my day has structure and purpose, and more importantly an aim. Before lockdown, daily goals revolved around how much schoolwork I could do, in losing that I reignited an old passion.
(My first attempt at a chocolate fudge cake, a bit lopsided but tasty!)
Baking has definitely become more mainstream, partly due to the success of The Great British Bake Off. Now, there are numerous food blogs and platforms to share both recipes and attempts at said recipes. A community has developed around baking, one which is especially important now as we all find our own way to cope with lockdown. This community helps budding bakers test themselves whilst encouraging those more experienced to keep on pushing. Baking is a form of escapism; in the past, I used it to escape the pressure of college, but now I (and I suspect many others) use it to escape the steady stream of news surrounding Covid-19 which is seemingly never-ending. The magic of baking is that nothing is off-limits the world is your oyster (although I wouldn’t recommend baking with oysters)!
When you bake, you can release all your emotions; happiness, anger, and sadness, and when you’ve finished your thoughts are less frantic and your mind is calmer. It’s a remedy for most of lives problems or at least a distraction. Distractions are not a perfect cure, but they are necessary. It would be impossible to spend the entirety of lockdown glued to the news, the news is scary and often a stark reminder of the dangers of Covid.
Spending time baking, creating something that can be enjoyed by family allows me to take a breath. I hope that as life slowly returns to normal, we all remember to take a breath and do what brought us sanity during lockdown.
Orla McAndrew
Featured image courtesy of Calum Lewis on Unsplash. This image has in no way been altered. Image license is available here.
Oh god, I relate so hard to this! Stress-baking is definitely a thing I do, too and i think you’re right- it serves as both an emotional outlet and a distraction.