Baking therapy

As I was building my fabulous meringue chocolate semifreddo yesterday (of which, more later) I was listening to a programme on the radio, one of those multidimensional newsy shows that segue neatly from one apparently shallow topic to the other. It sounds frippery but if you listen closely enough, you pick up unexpected gems. This was one of those. This was a segment all about baking, and was telling us what dedicated and enthused bakers like myself already know, which is that it can provide huge therapeutic benefits. Then they cut to an interview with a bunch of people, kids and young people mostly, who attend a regular baking group. What these people all had in common, was bereavement. They had all lost someone they loved, a grandmother, sibling or parent, and baking was a way of helping them manage their grief. Speaking as someone who in the weeks after my sister died would routinely find myself in the kitchen at 3am sieving flour or melting chocolate just to be able to mesmerise myself out of the pain, this struck immediate chords. Something else struck me too. One of the kids said, I lost my Dad two and a half years ago, so we are just coming down the hill. Really? There is something as logical and predictable as a hill in all this messy bereavement experience? I dunno, I am in the second year of my loss and if there is a hill somewhere I have yet to climb it. I characterise my loss more like what I imagine someone feels when they've been lost in the harshest of deserts for so long they can barely remember what water looks like. But on the other hand, as I listen to some of those kids recount memories of their loved ones at the same time as talking you through the cheese an onion quiche dough they are kneading simultaneously, perhaps it is nothing like as harsh. Perhaps after a year or so, it becomes more like a comfort blanket. You prefer to exist in those memories, you bury yourself in regret and in past experiences. My parents had a friend once, when I was much younger, who had lost his wife, like, 12 years previously or something. And all her clothes were still hung up in their bedroom. He hadn't touched a thing. He was a truly lovely man, I treated him like an  honorary Uncle, and I remember thinking how touching and romantic it was, and what depth of character it demonstrated. But wasn't there also something in there about just preferring to live in that cocoon? The truth is, I thought to myself as I folded my crushed meringue into my whipped, chocolatey double cream, that moving on is such a massive step, it takes such immense energy, and it needs you to work so hard at repackaging that past experience so you know where to put it in your new life that you will now go on to live without that person who used to share a part of it with you, that just going day to day with memories in the front of your head is just, well, easier. More familiar. And I am sure there is a nice big chunk of denial tucked away in there too. I don't think there is necessarily much wrong in living your life in your past. I have a hard enough time tucking away all the years I had my sister in my life and moving on, and it's not straightforward, and it can be really hard some days, and I am still having quite long periods where I will find a photograph of her somewhere and find I've spent most of the day sitting there staring at it. I just would rather imagine that she would prefer me to get on with it. Getting on with it, isn't about forgetting someone. It's about taking a slightly unsteady leap into a new future, your memories tucked safely away for you to protect, rather than live through.  When I sieve flour, whip cream, melt butter, add espresso coffee to chocolate and watch it catch and come together; whenever I roll truffles, blind bake a perfect pastry dough for an onion tart, whisk a million eggs for the lightest white chocolate icing ever, create the many layers of almond and egg that make up a frangipane; it creates a space for me to envisage that future, and make it more real, consequently less scarey, and crucially less guilty, to step into. Work does not provide this space. On the contrary, when I work it's a vehicle for obliterating these thoughts entirely. When my sister was really sick I worked stupid hours. Anything to displace the pain. And frankly, washing, ironing and vaccuming don't do it either. There may be people out there for whom ironing is a creative process but I do not count myself among their number. I pour my semifreddo into a lined bread tin and put it in the freezer. It is beautiful. It shines and froths and I cannot believe it is going to be 7 hours before anyone can try it (this is why it is my first time making one of these things. Instant gratification is what drove me to bake cakes in the first place and a semifreddo is the antithesis of instant gratification. Seven hours might as well be seven years when your taste buds are awake). I am dead pleased with myself for pulling off this new recipe, experimenting with it a bit, and working through a bit, just a bit, of the regret and guilt that continue to haunt me. Baking is never just about the cake.