If you are anything like me, you love a good late-night baking adventure. When you spend all of your classes as well as your time at work squinting at screens and writing article after article, essay after essay, you need to take a break from the screens from time to time. Nothing is quite as therapeutic as pulling an indulgent treat out of your own oven.
“Baking by Feel” by Becca Rea-Tucker takes this concept a step further. She has not only written several delicious and delightful recipes for sweets, from cream cheese sour cherry muffins to a butterscotch cake with honey-maple buttercream, but she has paired each recipe with an emotion that the treat is meant to help you tackle.
The book also begins with a forward that details, not only a quick start guide on how to categorize and identify your emotions, but also how to use the cookbook. In short, after you identify the emotion you are feeling, you can then turn to the page of the cookbook that deals with the emotion and make the recipe on the page.
Alongside the recipe, there is also a little entry that contextualizes the emotion by how it feels in your body and how your thoughts react. The entry then typically contains an anecdote revolving around the emotion and some form of journal entry to help you process the emotion while your baked good is in the oven.
I bought the cookbook two weeks into living in my new apartment. I had gone from living in a sorority house with all of my closest friends to living alone in an apartment on the other side of campus, a move I made to accommodate changes in my life that didn’t end up panning out. Long story short, for the first time in my whole college career, I was truly lonely.
And while a cookbook cannot fix all of your problems, it can help you process them. I brought this book into my apartment, and along with a few good novels, the Peach Bourbon Cake (heartbroken) and a pan of S’mores Rice Krispy Treats (lonely), I came out of the two weeks between moving in and starting classes a lot more okay with myself and my place in the world.
Lonely 20-somethings are not the only people Rea-Tucker has helped process their emotions. The book has more than 100 reviews on Goodreads and is on more than 4,000 people’s shelves. The author of the book is a native Texan, who is also heavily involved in activism regarding abortion access within the state on her Instagram, @thesweetfeminist. She also has an active Substack blog, a little something sweet, where she shares even more recipes and posts about activism, feminism and old 90’s rom-coms.
Emotions are a part of life, and that means even the bad ones are going to be around forever. Baking with them and dealing with them can make them all a little sweeter.
Abigail Spencer can be reached at arg-life@uidaho