Spring Baking

Yesterday spring sun warmed my bare skin -- arms, legs -- as I sat on the balcony while trees spread their still-bare branches against the warm blue sky.

Today the sky is a sheet of gray and from my cozy kitchen I could look out and imagine it to be midwinter. Cole has the sniffles and so I obliged his desire to be "up, up!" and carried him around as I got my baking things ready in the kitchen. I made him some chamomile tea with honey and pulled his high chair over so he could sit and drink tea and watch me bake something to take to my last small group meeting tomorrow night. I roasted and ground hazelnuts, zested a lemon, stirred and spread strawberry jam on a hazelnut-cookie crumb crust, and poured a lemon-hinted cheesecake filling over the jam. In the midst of this happy chaos, I found a skosh of popcorn languishing in the bottom of a bag in the corner of the pantry shelf and decided to pop it for Cole and me for a mid-morning snack. "Whoa, wow, whoa!" Cole exclaimed as the little seeds jumped and puffed in the pan. We munched while the strawberry cheesecake squares baked and I washed the dishes.

Yesterday Xhou-Ming, a classmate from my German course, came over to learn how to bake. It's not common to have an oven in your home kitchen in China, and she thought she should take advantage of the oven she has now that she's in Germany but she didn't know anything about baking. So I chose a simple recipe (Texas Sheet Cake) and walked her through measuring and melting and mixing till smooth. In her slightly broken English, with German words thrown in when they came to mind instead, she shared about studying to be a "Frau Artzin" (women's doctor) in China, and feeling like she never took the time to experience life but just went from school to university to hospital in an ever-increasing spiral of stress and responsibility. "I don't know what I can be if I'm not a doctor," she told me. I heard the things she didn't know how to phrase in English: her identity is wrapped up in being a doctor, but she knows that's not really the sum of who she is. Then she told me she thinks it's maybe better to do as I have done and try many different things. "I think you are happy," she said. She is right; I am. But what has that to do with college and career choices? God has made His home with me; He has appointed me as His ambassador in the world. My identity and purpose is in Him, and I told Xhou-Ming this secret to my happiness. I think if I were staying longer in Berlin we would get together again and perhaps become friends.

Tomorrow Heather and I plan to bake a chocolate mousse cake together. She wanted me to teach her to bake something before I left, and we are running out of time. We thought of making it for Cole's birthday celebration on Tuesday, but as it seems we have a surplus of chocolate cake at the moment, and it's a bit more sophisticated than is necessary for a two-year-old birthday, and they are having house guests in just over a week, and mousse cake is very happy to hang out in the freezer for a week or two, I think we will enjoy the baking -- the whipping and folding and melting and smoothing and the companionship of creating together -- tomorrow, and they will enjoy the eating after I'm gone.

As the spring sun will soon coax a garden of green out of the winter branches, yet bare, so I pray God will make the seeds planted during my months here grow.