#35: The Christmas Cookies
Friday night was my last night of Michaelmas term up in Durham before going home for Christmas. Was I out partying hard and on my way to Klute, ‘the worst nightclub in Europe’? Nope. I was with a friend in my kitchen, up until 2am, baking and decorating Christmas cookies. Classic student life.
To be precise, these are sugar cookies, a traditional American cookie for this festive time of year. I got the recipe here, if anyone’s interested — I recommend half an hour of chilling them in the fridge before cutting them into shapes to bake, otherwise the recipe is perfect. They are simple and tasty and easy to decorate, and we made a lot more than are featured in the photo.
The evening was our way of celebrating the end of a long and tough term — a good term, but still tiring, and we needed something fun to look forward to. And baking is one of the things that I enjoy, a new found love once I got to university and had free reign in my ‘own’ kitchen.
People joke about stress baking or procrastibaking, and I do truly find it enjoyable. With the popularity of The Great British Bake Off these past few years, baking is once again a pretty popular thing to be doing. And who’s really going to complain? I know my housemates don’t mind it when they come into the kitchen to find a box of cinnamon sugar cookies or slices of chocolate chip banana cake for them all to eat.
For me, baking is a time to embrace my ‘domestic’ side, and I like that side of me. I am a person who loves cosiness, and the idea of the home and the domestic will always offer a sense of comfort to me. Call me traditional, but it’s just one of the things that I treasure.
Yet there has been all sorts of debates over baking, cooking, and gender, and the rise of ‘cupcake feminism’. It’s a very big, important, and contentious topic, and I am not going to try and cover it all in my 3 minute blog post. The idea of the ‘domestic’ has oh so many connotations. If I am calling myself domestic, am I reclaiming otherwise gendered assumptions? Or am I falling back into a world where the women are expected to always be the domestic centre of the home, and not much else? Do I lose out either way? And does baking have to be considered somehow less important than other culinary skills, like in 5 star restaurants? I think the rise of The Great British Bake Off is having some effect in arguing against this view, when you see some of the skilful baking they’re having to do, but there’s still a way to go.
There’s a major issue in feminism: Do we abandon the roles placed upon the different genders in the past, or do we try to reclaim them? I’m sorry to say, but there really isn’t an easy answer to this. In my humble opinion, feminism is about fighting for choice for both genders, and those choices include making the choice to be domestic some of the time. I am thankful that I do not have to be domestic for 100% of the rest of my life, that I can also go out and work, that I can go to university, and that I can work with tools and learn to solder LED lights together (one of my many random jobs). I love having and learning all of these different skills, I love having the choice, and I also love being able to improve my skills at baking.
So I shall now go and sit down with a cup of coffee, one of my festive biscuits, and my university work, because I am a woman of the 21st Century, and the women in my past have fought for my right to choose a life of combining work and the domestic.
