The Winter of My Box Cakes

Around 4PM every evening, my mood descends perfectly in time with the sun. I am creatively depleted from a day of trying to write, my husband usually still has a few more hours of work to do, and it is almost time to pick my children up from school.

The days are short and cold and I’m indoors with two elementary school-aged children with runny noses. The children seemingly come out from school sick as frequently as they come out not-sick and I will, I worry, forever be anxious when it comes to their health, even in the face of a simple common cold. I spend far too much time online to not catastrophize everything.

They come home happy, though, and putter around, setting up elaborate games, avoiding showers and homework, trying to negotiate some weekday screen time because of the “winter blues” — they’ve heard me speaking, they hear everything.

They need me so much during these hours and I want to give them my all, but my all isn't what they need. They need just enough of me that I can’t read a book and I certainly cannot work on writing a book. They need just enough of me that I can still sit on the couch and stare at the ceiling in despair.

So I started baking cakes and cupcakes from box mixes. It started when I bought two on a whim, thinking I’d make them someday with the kids, a fun cold day activity. But then I made a box myself one evening, flitting between our open kitchen and the dining table where the children do their homework, explaining multiplication while taking two eggs out of the fridge, returning to help my younger one with phonics while holding my measuring cup for only oil and milk. I discovered, during those difficult few hours when my anxiety peaks and I usually feel 10% of my brain spiraling into a state of blind panic and depression that threatens to overtake the remaining 90%, I can rescue myself by using that 10% to bake things not-from-scratch.

“It’s too cold, it’s too dark. This is what I’m doing. I’m baking.”

Those first two boxes got used up in two days so I put on my snow boots and went back to Whole Foods and bought seven more and our kitchen counters and dining table and fridge and pantry have started filling up with cakes of different sizes and cupcakes of different colors. Our children delight in this obsessive new hobby of their mother’s, resulting in more sugar than they’ve ever been allowed to have.

“I’m putting flaxseed in so it’s not really unhealthy,” I say to my husband when he asks if I maybe want to go and take a walk instead of start stirring another batch of artificially spongey cake mix.

“No!” I shout. “It’s too cold, it’s too dark. This is what I’m doing. I’m baking.”

I play music and the children dance around the living room while I follow the nearly-identical recipes at the back of each box. Some need two eggs, some three. Eggs are expensive, this is becoming an expensive addiction, but I find myself starting to look forward to the dark hours between pick up and bedtime, which feel endless this time of year. I tuck away my creativity but instead of resenting that, I look forward to the mechanical stirring of ingredients that fill the home with the smell of vanilla and chocolate, sometimes pumpkin and cinnamon. I don’t try anything elaborate or new, nothing that would require thinking. It is a meditative act.

The recycling bin fills up with empty boxes. I pack cupcakes for school lunches, I drop some off for our neighbor, being vague about how from-scratch I made them. Sometimes I feel guilty about too much sugar and throw away huge numbers and then feel guilty about wasting food in a world where too many people have too little. Then all that guilt just makes me more anxious so I rush back to Whole Foods and get some more cake mixes

Diksha Basu is the author of Destination Wedding and The Windfall.