I love food. I only partly mean that in the compulsive eating my feelings kind of way. Inside me there is a greedy chubby kid that for some reason I picture as similar to Dudley from the Harry Potter books. Due to growing up as a part of the generation of America's Next Top Model and The O.C. outside of me is a somewhat vain young woman torturing herself with P90X workouts. Anyway, specifically, I love cooking and baking. I love the smell of bread as it is leavening or when its fresh out of the oven, the sound of the sizzle when raw chicken is put on a hot pan, the texture of sifted flour, the flavor of perfectly made sauce. Basically food is my porn.

And food makes sense. Ingredients combine in fundamentally predictable yet delightfully sensitively nuanced ways. I made a batch of chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter icing, baking has become one of my ways of feeling like I'm still learning and doing something productive now that school is over and all I have is my seemingly dead-end job as a waitress. But its more than that as well, baking is a subtle art with room for creativity even in its exactness. Even something as simple as cupcakes require full engagement in the process. Add too much baking soda or mix the butter in at the wrong time and you get shitty cupcakes with a weird aftertaste or a terrible texture. The understated yet complete pleasure of putting the wonderfully fluffy chocolate cupcake with the deliciously creamy peanut butter icing on top in your mouth fills you with  happiness thats as pure as breathing in the scent of your mother's perfume when you hug her. In a world gone mad, you can still count on cupcakes to make you feel good.