🎂 The Overzealous Cake Baker
Or: You can't give what you don't have
“Hey, I’d love to get together—it’s been so long! Would you mind baking a cake for our visit? You’re so good at it!”
Sure, she thought, she loves baking, and she loves catching up with friends.
“Don’t forget it’s Aunt Judy’s big birthday next week—you should bake her a cake!”
Ah, right! She almost forgot. Aunt Judy was rounding the corner of a new decade. She should definitely mark the occasion, and why not with a cake?
“We’d love to have you as the main feature for our big event coming up! It will be great exposure, as the top executives from our corporate headquarters will be there. Can you bring a few of your best cakes, enough to serve our global team flying in?”
Sure, why not? She thought, she would just create a mini assembly line in her kitchen and bake these alongside the rest. No problemo!
Although she was becoming a little overwhelmed by the cake commitments ahead, baking in her free time was always something she enjoyed. Besides, she loved making people happy!1 She wanted to say yes to her friends, her family, and her professional opportunities. She saw other people around her baking up a storm—many more cakes and much faster—so this should be no problem for her.
Carefully, she plotted out the timing, making a checklist of every step and ingredient. She cleared her calendar and wrote BAKE DAY across the upcoming Saturday. As the day approached, her anxiety started spiking, but she reassured herself that she had done it before and that it would be no problem to do it again.
At last, it was go time. She woke up early, tip-toed downstairs so she didn’t wake the rest of the house, tied her favorite apron on, and and played on her favorite podcast.
Just one problem.
When she went into her pantry to gather the ingredients, it was completely empty.
She looked frantically from side to side. Where is everything?! I am supposed to be baking already! I’ll never make it in time!
There were dust balls where the bag of flour should have been, and the sugar was a stale brick. She opened the fridge to find a single egg frozen solid after sitting at the back of the shelf, and only a few measly drops of almond milk swishing sadly from side to side in the carton.
Her heart sunk—today was a major holiday, so the grocery stores wouldn’t open for a few more hours. Even if she traveled to one farther from her apartment, she wouldn’t be able to make it back in time and get all the baking done.
She mentally kicked herself. She knew she should have picked a different day, and she definitely should have triple-checked that all her ingredients were stocked and ready.
But I promised my friend! And I don’t want to disappoint my Aunt! And I need the money from the corporate gig! She could cry. It wasn’t like her to drop the ball so spectacularly.
She had made one too many promises, and now she would fail them all.
At that moment, a cliché that she’d heard for years (and even parroted to others a few times) took on a new, visceral meaning: You can’t give what you don’t have.
It didn’t matter what she wanted to give, what she should give, what others wanted her to give, what other people like her could give, what she used to be able to give, or how shiny the shoulds were. She simply didn’t have it—at least not right now. And so, she couldn’t give it. The math was as simple as that. No more, no less. You can’t give what you don’t have.
Feeling resigned, yet with a sense of renewed clarity and conviction, she cleared her cake commitments and vowed to start fresh.
Next time, she would check the pantry before making promises. She would be more conservative with her ingredients, too. Just because she once baked in bulk didn’t mean it was aligned with her energy now, today, and possibly even tomorrow.
She would surely have to disappoint people in the short term, maybe even everyone, in order to stock the pantry back up. But it was better than baking with bad ingredients.2
❤️
Astute Free Time readers will recognize this as a third cake-baking scenario; consider it an addendum to “Chapter 5: Let It Be Easy, Let It Be Fun.” Catch up in this free excerpt »
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As she sat on the couch, recalibrating her commitments, the doorbell rang. On the stoop was a friend she hadn’t seen in a long time, bearing red velvet cupcakes.
As they caught up over tea and indulged in those little delights, she realized it was the shared enjoyment of the cakes themselves that got her baking in the first place.
Brilliant analogy.