Social Desserts
Monday before last, I made a cake. I’d been feeling lousy, emotionally speaking, and hoped baking might be a mood booster.
Hours later, I unmolded a cooled cake from my prized Nordic Ware bundt pan, dusted it with powdered sugar, and then had a choice to make: To post or not to post?
The question was not unrelated to my lousy mood. Awhile back, I set up a time limit on my Instagram app, and didn’t think much more about it. That week, feeling uncharacteristically lonely, needy, and adrift, I started hitting the limit nearly every day. What was I searching for in this virtual slide show? Instagram has long ceased to be a showcase of the lives of my friends and acquaintances. Now it mostly shows me restaurant reviews, movie news, and videos of people I’ve never heard of, whose faces are seldom shown, doing esoteric arts and crafts.
I notice this, and I notice the way I keep trying — and social media keeps failing — to compensate when I want company I don’t have. The noticing makes me question the whole endeavor. Why, exactly, am I compelled to post a photo of anything I bake? Is it, like, a desperate plea for attention? How will I feel if no one notices? What are we even doing with this miracle, the Internet?
About the cake: it was a Marmorkuchen, a marble cake from a cookbook my dad got me for my last birthday called Classic German Baking. The gift had not been a wild guess on his part. Last fall, as we drove from Santa Fe to Corrales, we listened to the author, Luisa Weiss, discuss the book on a podcast. Struck by how much the German baking traditions she described reminded him of his own (German) mother’s regimented and generous kitchen practices, he ordered a copy of the book for himself. At Christmas, back at his house once again, I pored over the fat book, looking for one last addition to my holiday cookie offering. Somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd Day of Christmas, my dad and I stood in his Santa Fe kitchen, twisting fragile tubes of buttery dough into chubby, pretzel-shaped cinnamon cookies.
The recipes interested me, as did the personal heritage to which they were tied, however ephemerally. Above all, I was fascinated by the book’s introduction. Ms. Weiss, almost in passing, described how her father and his coworkers took a break every day to eat slabs of cake they’d all brought from home. Her mother, and many others like her, still made a coffee cake every weekend to serve to guests, family, friends, or neighbors who might drop by on a Sunday afternoon, presumably hungry for cake.
I say this introduction fascinated me; in truth, it made me sad. Call it Weltschmerz. Ah, maybe in some other time, or some other life, people could stop by my kitchen table just to say hello, and I could feed them from my ready supply of baked goods. But it was hard to picture. I thought of how my closest friends and family — the ones who might drop by uninvited — live hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.
Even recently, I lamented to my friend Mary Kate that all I wanted was to be able to drop by her house for dinner; she lives in Maryland. A week later, she’d sent me a present: a travel mug with two houses drawn on it. Above them, the mug reads, “I wish you lived next door.”
Of course, I have some wonderful friends in Los Angeles, and I would hate to sell them short. But house call are rare. It’s a bit of a side effect of the city’s infamous sprawl and corresponding traffic. Here, the truly genteel thing to do is to devise a meet-up destination that’s midway between each person’s starting point. I recently arranged a lunch in Studio City because it seemed like the fairest, least objectionable conjunction for three parties driving in from Silver Lake, North Hollywood, and Venice. This is the kind of trigonometry a simple lunch can necessitate.
The promise of Classic German Baking was intoxicating, but it seemed to me a mirage, no realer than my social bond with a stranger tie-dyeing t-shirts on an Instagram Reel.
In the sitcoms I grew up on, the “getting together” aspect of adult friendship seemed so easy. A city apartment building was the grown-up equivalent of a college dorm. Chandler and Joey across the hall, Ross across the street. Lily and Marshall upstairs, Robin and Barney a short cab ride away. Kramer across the hall, George and Elaine constantly ducking in on their way to anywhere else. Urkel? Can’t get rid of the guy. The Golden Girls? Living Single? The New Girl? The friends all live together in THE SAME HOUSE.
A couple years back, a long-time acquaintance, also named Marissa, moved to my neighborhood and became a full-on Friend, as did her then-housemate, Josh. For the past year or so, we’ll get together from time to time, and we often marvel at the convenience of it. Neighbors, kinda. Wow. And that’s how rare it felt, and still feels. “Wow” rare.
I posted the cake photo to Instagram. It wasn’t my best camera work, but it was a striking cake, and my grid had been looking a bit neglected. It was late by the time the cake cooled and I could photograph the final product, complete with a slice for myself. I went to bed.
The next morning, my cake photo had hardly set the Web ablaze, but I did have a comment from Marissa. “I’ll be right over,” she wrote.
I should have texted her directly right then. I ought to have set a plan in motion. Instead, I replied to her comment, continuing the bit: “I mean honestly, someone is going to have to eat it.” And that was it. Almost.
That afternoon, I took a walk to the tiny Target that recently opened near me. This store’s opening has drastically expanded the number of groceries and sundries I can acquire without driving or going on an hour-long hike. I was primarily out to pick up some heavy cream to whip and eat with my new, delicious, but slightly dry cake. On my walk back, cream in hand, someone called out to me from across the street. “Flax-B!” they called, narrowing the list of potential greeters to one, the only person I know who has done that particular thing to my name; the person who needed a nickname for me for me because he already had a Marissa in his life. My neighbor Josh, walking his sweet dog, and also on his way to the life-changing tiny Target.
I told him about the whipping cream, and about the cake. “You guys should come have some of this cake,” I offered before heading off on my way. And that was it. Almost.
The next day, something cohered. A group text from Marissa to Josh and me. Two emojis: A slice of Cake. A big, red question mark.
That evening, having already fed themselves dinner, Marissa and Josh sat at my dining room table and we all ate Marmorkuchen. It was a Wednesday, not a Sunday. Minor details aside, it was not lost on me that I was living that impossible dream from the cookbook introduction. It hadn’t been impossible at all; it hadn’t even been that hard.
And something else I was wrong about: it never would have happened if I hadn’t posted that cake pic.
Of course, now I know better. I can simply send a text — to Marissa and Josh, or to someone else who might be in need of a little no-strings-attached social dessert. “I baked,” I can say. “Wanna drop by?”
In other news…
My podcast, Sweet Valley Diaries, is back for Season 8!
I really try to make Sweet Valley Diaries a show that can be fun and entertaining for anyone, not just people who know a lot about the Sweet Valley High books the show is devoted to recapping. If you’re at all interested in looking back at what we were feeding impressionable young minds (mostly of the “girl” variety) in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and/or have an interest in soap operatic sagas, check it out. Start wherever you like; new episodes come out on Thursdays.
If you’re interested in listening to the podcasts I work on professionally, they are two very different shows about movies, Feeling Seen and Maximum Film!.
On Feeling Seen, host Jordan Crucchiola recently interviewed the iconic Mary Harron, best known for directing American Psycho; you can hear my voice delivering a quiz I wrote at the end of a recent Maximum Film! episode about the 1957 version of A Star is Born (the Judy Garland one).