No. Wrong. Dead wrong.
We haven't spent much time together since I left to university and she spent the year in our hometown, working and taking classes at the local college. But thousands of kilometres don't mean much when it comes to zesting a lemon and measuring out flour. We spent hours in the kitchen, getting to know the different people we've both become after a year apart.
I estimate. I measure in pinches and handfuls and feelings. I never sift my flour and I've learned to live with the results. I am trying every day to be more spontaneous and flexible. But I always end up coming home to tried and true recipes that I know by heart. I am emotional and chaotic and I bake for comfort rather than accomplishment.
My dear friend, she makes bold choices. She spends hours researching recipes and always chooses the most complicated one. She is calculated, leveling and sifting (and re-sifting, I was told, because anyone who doesn't is basically a caveman. Oops!) and weighing ingredients, and if she doesn't get the result she wants, she goes back and does it again.
We are different. I love nothing more than deep, rich, chocolate cake. She prefers chiffon. She avidly reads baking blogs, while I keep a collection of stained and tattered thrift store cookbooks. We are different, but after two and a half hours attempting what looked like a straightforward recipe for lemon macarons, we were both laughing until our sides ached when our finished product turned out a little more like this:
I love old friends. The kind with whom you can sink into conversation so rich and powerful that you don't even realize your eyes are brimming with tears until the person sitting next to you asks for a tissue. The kind where you can start any sentence with "Remember that time" and finish it with a collection of memories, coming into focus in your mind like a Polaroid picture. These things aren't instant. It takes time (in our case, about fourteen years - something that still feels unbelievable but true) to find the people that will hold fast in your heart.
We've changed. We are no more the same people we were when we first met - all pig-tails and pencil crayons on the school yard - than those yellow blobs up there are French macarons. But I am so grateful for sweet and tangy, lick-the-spoon nights like last night.
Some days my heart beats out reassurances like: You need to accept these changes. You need to remember that no one stands still, that a year from now life won't look like it does in that Polaroid picture. That your macarons won't always rise and your friends won't always see the world in the same way that you do.
I need to remind myself that change is good and Thursday nights are sweet and if you ever need to talk, just say the word and I'll curl up on the couch next to you, with a glass of milk and a plate of dessert and my eyes wide open, trying to memorize your face like a photograph. I will be there for your joys and your failures, and one day we'll try again - macarons round two - and laugh and cry and whisper "Remember that time" when we did this all before.
If you're interested in more daring baking and picture taking, you can find my friend Kennix's blog right here.
Dearest Erika, you're picture taking is better than mine. As is your writing. You're way too kind! Haha, thanks for making me sound AMAZING. ;)
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