Terrific Bakes: Mental Breaks and Medicinal Cakes
It’s been a long night
Hello, old friends.
It’s been quite a while since I wrote about my journey with cake, and there are some very good, and very ungood reasons for that.
The Good
I was lucky enough this year to get involved with my town’s first ever Pride as their Creative Director. To say it went well would be an understatement:
To say it took all of my time, energy, and creativity for seven months would also be an understatement.
Stages, tents, street signs, merchandise, social media tiles, event posters, and literally 56 OTHER pieces of collateral had to be designed for this event. Oh, and don’t forget the creative support for nine lead-up events. Oh, oh, and don’t underestimate the amount of time it takes to fit 100+ corporate logos on a step-and-repeat.
I loved working on this project and contributing so much to my community, but as the momentum of the event rose, so too did the scope of the work and the breadth of the project. By the time the festival day arrived on June 11th, our entire team of volunteers was burned out. I, personally, spent over four hundred hours to get this first event off the ground.
It was a wild success, but I was so burned out that all I could do was make a cake… this cake… this perfect encapsulation of my headspace after the months of creative work.
Yeah. That messy beast feels right.
A great time. A creative flex. An important event for the community.
And a great opportunity for my worst habits to surface!
The Ungood
To say I lost myself in the work of mounting Pride would be a kindness.
To say I fell back into the trappings of aggressive overachievement at the cost of my mental and physical health abandoning all other personal goals and desires, testing my relationships and threatening to derail the life I’m trying to build…. would be too melodramatic, but a bit closer to home.
If any of you ever worked with me in a corporate environment, you know I could be intense. There’s something about thinking you’re the hardest working person in the room (BTW, you’re probably not: it’s all subjective) that makes you feel good. There’s also a special kind of kink you (I) get when someone says things like “I don’t know how you do it? How did you get all this done?”
No one wants to know the answer to that question.
Because the answer is that lots of things get done because everything else gets dropped to do them. Sleep: sacrificed. Exercise: skipped. Calls to friends: who needs ‘em? There’s tasks to be done! Things to produce! Praise to earn that keeps you from passing out, but doesn’t stop you from crying from exhaustion. And for some reason, each task that gets completed convinces you to do five more, because you know you can get it all done if only you chip away a little bit more at yourself.
It’s addictive, and gratifying, and fun, and something I fall victim to A LOT.
After my last executive role, I was determined not to let myself fall victim to these voices again. I’m not opposed to being a creative executive again, but every time I talk to a recruiter I can feel the little ENTJ devil on my shoulder conconcting all the ways I can make this new opportunity MY ENTIRE LIFE!!!
I wasn’t dissapointed in the work for pride. I’m honestly thrilled to still be part of the team and to do the event again next year. It was the first year of a major, volunteer-led event, and it would have been naive to think the first year wasn’t going to be uniquely demanding.
I was dissapointed in how enthusiastically I fell back into my old habits of not taking care of myself and overextending my work, though. Pride just happened to be a nice opportunity to catalyze my most successful and destructive impulses.
a prescription of “cake”
Everything, Barbara!
Cake has everything to do with everything!
Although I kept making cakes throughout the summer (Cake Week 11: FRUITS, FRUITS, FRUITS!), my creative enthusiasm was sapped from my work in the spring. I decided I needed a new lens to see my cakes through. I was making cakes, but I wasn’t playing with cakes, and I’ve always been one to toy with my prey.
Taking a HUGE hit of inspiration from my incredibly talented friend Shannon Heibler (https://www.makingandmovies.com/), I’ve decided to make some cakes inspired by my, if not favorite, at least my most influential genre: horror.
But, I hate horror movies!
Good for you. Me, too?
Horror movies often send me into a week long spiral of contemplation and dread.
No other genre (although science fiction and fantasy fiction come close) makes me question things or feel things as deeply as horror. The stakes. The suspicion of belief. The new rules of existence. Horror, at its best, runs its characters and audiences through an obstacle course that forces us to confront the unspeakable parts of our humanity. It’s like music: you can say and experience things in their heightened worlds that you could NEVER get away with in a drama.
So for the next few months, I’ll be going through my rolodex of some of the horror classics (to me) and making a cake inspired by them.
In the vein (get ready for a lot of visceral puns) of this project, I’m also taking a leap into the unmoored depths of the internet and accompanying my cakes with a video tutorial (of sorts) on Youtube for those who want to get a little bit more insight into what goes into making my sugary monsters. You can also always follow me on Instagram @thecakeshaveeyes and eventually on TikTok? I’ve reserved my name, but as a forty-year-old… TikTok might be the real horror.
THE Terrific Bakes
I am 100% going to spoil these movies, so if you’ve been meaning to watch one of these, you better get to it before It gets to you!
Also, don’t you dare tell me some of these aren’t horror movies.
You can discuss that with my therapist.
Night of the living dead
Scream
Jennifer’s Body
Stepford Wives (1975)
The Descent
The Witches(1990)
Poltergeist
Firestarter (1984)
Tremors
IT (1990)
The Fly
It Follows
Alien
Return to Oz
Deep Blue Sea
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Halloween (1978)
The Thing (1982)
Candyman (1992)
Battle Royale
Nightmare on Elm Street 2
Jawbreaker
Haute Tension
Child’s Play (1988)
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
See you next week with a very special black-and-white cake celebrating the true terror of “Night of the Living Dead.”
Ghouls!
Definitely not racism.
Definitely not fallout from a nuclear war.
Nope.
Nothing to see here but ghouls.
