When I first started cooking, I thought I could never find something I loved as much. To me, nothing was as satisfying as the smell of soy sauce and chicken, or of watching cheese melt into a mess of tomato and meat sauce, garlic and noodles, or watching as vegetables get brighter than even when they were fresh.

Then I started baking. To me, there’s something ultimately satisfying about watching egg whites get stiff and glossy, or the smell of yeasted bread, and seeing it rise.

To me, there’s just something magical about throwing a mess of ingredients into an oven and watch it turn into a cake or muffins or scones.
Not a lot of people get that, I know. I’m the only teenager I know who can spend hours watching the Food Network, who reads Cook’s Illustrated and Cooking Light instead of whatever celebrity magazine is sitting in the dentist’s office. Whose first crush isn’t on the cute boy at school, but the boy who won a baking contest.

Baking is something that calms me down. It’s something I do when I just can’t think. When I’m so overwhelmed from a busy week, I just need an hour or two of doing something that I love.

I want to go to culinary school. I want to learn how to blend butter and flour to make perfectly flakey dough, to make my own puff pastry, to make and stack cakes so beautiful it would fit in at a wedding.

I want to learn how to write recipes. That would open up the whole world of baking, to find something that perfectly suites my tastes.
I want to start my own bakery. Something cute, and rustic, where people can sit and drink coffee and eat yummy pastries, someplace that feels like their home.

I am currently baking in the kitchen, trying recipes I find on Pinterest, yet I’ve started tweaking, to slowly change the recipes. I’ve started taking classes at PCC.

This is want I say when people ask me what I want to be when I grow up. But I know.

I already am a baker.