Whenever I go shopping, I tend to shop in themes. By this, I
mean if the first item I select happens to be some shade of blue and lacy,
there is a high probability that another item in the batch will match that. By
the time I wrap up the trip, I’ll have about three blue lace tops that all look
rather similar from a distance but are very uniquely different in my eyes… The
theme of the day is blue lace.
Similarly, I once thought of baking in themes. I thought of
segments in which every day/week/month I would make something that fell within
certain guidelines… Maize and Blue Saturdays was a theme throughout last year’s
football season. Happy Hour Fridays with alcoholic ingredients once crossed my
mind. Baking with “super foods” was another thought.
Clearly, I haven’t been baking in themes much, although occasionally
I may bake one or two treats that have similar or complementing elements within
the same short period of time. Like my shopping spurts, these occasions aren’t
so much carefully planned in advance as they are about my taste or preference
of the moment. For example, in the fall, I often like to utilize pumpkin and cinnamon…
Who doesn’t?
Over the last few weeks, I found myself making a number of
related sweets that fell very much into a theme. So much so, that I began to
wonder how I was going to package them all. How I was going to introduce each
to you in a way that moved seamlessly.
Then I stopped thinking and started writing. I find it’s
much easier and far more therapeutic to pour out my thoughts however cluttered
and unpolished they may be and worry about packaging and cleaning it all up
later.
Ernest Hemingway captured this concept better than anyone
when he said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
