1) Preheat the Oven to 350°.
Press each button; 3-5-0 with buzzing fingers. Fingers moving quickly and anxiously, ready for the magic of dough.
Watch as the oven opens its eyes and comes to life. Its heat is like kindling.
2) Prepare the Dry Ingredients.
Mix the dry ingredients and glow with excitement about these cupcakes. Watch the flour and sugar and cocoa powder fuse together like a puzzle quickly coming together, one piece at a time.
Combine the ingredients with a whisk. Move slowly and carefully, just like in all those shows. You don’t need to move very fast, they say, so you listen.
3) In a Stand Mixer, Whisk the Wet Ingredients.
Attach the whisk attachment to the mixer and pour all the wet ingredients into the bowl. Immediately the pungent smell of vinegar tickles your nose; it crawls into your clothes and seeps into your skin. You love the smell, and you hate it, but that’s baking, isn’t it?
Memories of first grade come floating back. Brown lips, brown fingers, brown smiles, brown cheeks. Sugar clouds, laden with chocolate frosting. Sugar-coated laughs, sticky with sweetness.
The mixer buzzes.
Who are they?
Who are you?
All you have left are recipes.
4) Combine the Dry and Wet Ingredients, Making Sure to Whisk Out Any Lumps.
Combine all the ingredients together. Do it slowly to ensure everything is mixed evenly. You don’t remember where you learned this; maybe from cookbooks or baking shows or Grandma or recipes. You’ve done it so many times, it’s embedded in the fabric of your skin.
When everything is combined, hand mix the batter to eliminate any lumps. Whisk and whisk and whisk. Your arm is tired, but you whisk through the sore ache. You just want to get these cupcakes right. Whisk until you can’t feel anything anymore. Whisk until you’re not in the kitchen anymore; you’re at Grandma’s house on Mother’s Day. You creep down the stairs, careful not to step on the ones that creak. You bask in the heat of the morning light and feel close and connected. You emanate happiness and warmth. You watch as she starts to cut fruit: cantaloupes, strawberries, pineapples. You follow along to the YouTube video on her phone that instructs how to make toast. This is a special toast; you use cookie cutters to cut out stars in the bread. You spread butter over the toast and wish to stay here forever.
5) Line the Tin With Cupcake Liners and Divide the Batter Evenly.
Don’t use colors like neon pink and orange. Don’t fill your days with sprinkles and sugar. You no longer have yellow birthday cakes that were so sweet, you flew, or cupcakes with rainbow sprinkles so bright, they blinded you. Choose white because you aren’t a child anymore.
Carefully divide the batter into the tin so as not to spill anything. Inevitably a drop splotches on the hardwood floor. Exclaim to your dog not to eat it. Chocolate is poisonous to dogs. Even the bitter chocolate chips you turn into delicious cookies each year at Christmas. Even the luxurious chocolate lollipops Grandma buys that you and your cousins fight over. Frantic hands wriggling and grasping at thin lollipop sticks. Bodies hungry for sugar. You can’t imagine living without chocolate. Living without chocolate is living without connection, without family, without memories. From baby nicknames to tea parties to long Christmases spent hunched over steaming plates of starches, vegetables, sugars, and proteins. Food has always been there for you; it’s immersed in your life. Always use unsalted butter. Don’t pack down the flour. Don’t overmix. You know so many tips and tricks that you barely remember where you got them all. Memory is such a tricky thing. One moment you’re there, crafting the memory; next, you don’t know where you got this information.
6) Place Tin Into the Oven and Bake for 20 Minutes.
Place the cupcake tin into the murmuring oven and wait. Wait, wait, wait. As you wait, nourish yourself not with food, but with indulgent memories. Like the time you made caramel with your friend but forgot to add the sugar. Faces quenched and lips puckered, this isn’t right, you thought, before realizing. But both of you laughed and ate them anyway. They weren’t that bad.
7) Take the Cupcakes out of the Oven and Leave to Cool.
Or how about Thanksgiving? There have been so many, that they all feel the same. Love delivered in soft mac and cheese or warm sweet potatoes with marshmallows. Salads as large as your face or bread rolls that your brother eats by the dozen.
The first thing you notice when you open the oven door is the scent. Chocolate swirls through the air and wraps around your body in a hug.
Baking is like rewinding time.
8) Make the Icing.
As the cupcakes cool, start making the chocolate icing. Icing is simple; you know this from experience. In a chocolate haze, combine the powdered sugar and cocoa powder. Watch as they mix, mix, mix.
Powdered sugar wafts everywhere from the counter to your clothes. It’s so sweet that you can taste it on your tongue, just by thinking about it.
Add the soy milk, vanilla extract, and vegan butter. Make sure to use teaspoons instead of tablespoons for the vanilla. You’ve made this mistake before; you know the consequences.
9) Pipe the Icing.
It’s time for everything to come together. Fill the flimsy, plastic piping bag with icing and begin to pipe. Try to be as precise and perfect as possible, but don’t have high expectations. Piping is difficult since you don’t have a piping tip; you lost it while baking some time ago. You get thick chocolate icing all over your fingers, but you don’t care. It’s happened so many times before; your fingers are always caked in sugar.
Once all the cupcakes are iced, take photos. By now, your phone bulges with so many food photos, that it barely works. It’s forever trapped in a lazy food coma. You have close-up photos of aesthetically pink macarons and your 15th birthday strawberry shortcake. You have colorful photos of the unique, tropical fruits in Colombia, and blurry photos of popsicles you had in Hawaii. You have some documentation that these moments were real.
Reminisce about the last time you made chocolate cupcakes. Society was closed and you were locked inside; what else were you supposed to do?
With nervous, bouncing hands you baked chocolate cupcakes. You topped them with Hamilton decorations because why not? It didn’t matter that you couldn’t share them with many people; you took photos. You sent photos on the family group chat and so many people wrote back that your phone hiccupped with texts for the rest of the day:
That’s awesome!
That is sooo cool!!
Love the decorations!
They look yummy!
Very nice, are they vegan?
It felt good to be connected again, your entire family threaded together through cocoa powder and icing.
10) Enjoy!
Sink your teeth into one pillowy chocolate cupcake. Don’t just taste chocolate. Taste: Grandma’s homemade pasta, fresh pineapples in the countryside of Panama, umami miso soup from the Japanese Tea Gardens, chocolate croissants with a friend, warm pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, fluffy waffles on Saturday.
As you savor each bite of your hard work, you bite through layers of memories. Memories that reside in everything from the teaspoon of vanilla to the cup of soy milk.
Lounge in the hypnotizing smell of vanilla; it’s strong yet friendly.
Revel in what you’ve made, the joy you have crafted.
Food is the beating heart of everything. It has brought you together through thick and thin.
Heat blossoms on the apples of your cheeks; your body is warm and alive.
Cove Johnson Rabidoux is a writer whose work can be found in the Young Writers Project, The Teen Magazine, The Spearhead Magazine, the Hot Pot Magazine, Leaders Across the World, and on her blog “Blue Pencil Writing.” She serves as an editor for the Trailblazer Literary Magazine, Hot Pot Magazine, Cathartic Youth Magazine, and many more. When she is not writing her novel, Cove enjoys reading, traveling, and baking.
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