‘tis the season to teach your kids to bake – even if their creation comes straight from a packaged mix

Photo above by Food Photographer Jennifer Pallian via Unsplash.

The holidays are a time when many families are busy baking cookies and cakes, including favorite family recipes. Could this be the year that you teach your kids to do some baking on their own?

Depending on their age, they’ll probably need some supervision. And you’ll need to teach some skills. But for many young people – myself included – the real challenge that I had to get past was realizing that sometimes a delicious treat baked with love, even if it comes partly or entirely from a box, is just as meaningful as something baked totally from scratch.

Oddly enough, I figured this out not in a kitchen but backstage at a theater.

One night in October, I found myself hurrying down a hallway and then taking a deep breath as I knocked on the male dressing room door.

“Costumes,” I called out. The door swung open and I pulled my target, an actor named Joe, into the corridor.

“You’re looking for whoever made the chocolate iced cookies last Sunday?” I ask him.

“Yes!” he says. “You made the cookies? Or your mom?”

“I did,” I told him. In fact, I’d been kind of nervous about them, although they’re the best recipe I have. I had shoved them in their Christmas tin onto a corner of the dessert table, and constantly worried no one would eat any.

“Oh my God, dude,” Joe said. “Those were the best cookies I’ve ever eaten. I must have had, like, seven. Could you give me the recipe? Is it a family secret?”

Shame crawled up my neck as I admitted the truth: “No, it’s just an online recipe.”

“Awesome! Can you send it to me?”

And that’s how, aided by the strange crosshairs of high school theater, I sent a grown man and virtual stranger my favorite “Texas Sheet Cake Cookies” recipe, which he was excited to make for his wedding anniversary the following week.

As I sent him the recipe, I thought about making the cookies: Up too early on show-tired legs in my kitchen, I had started with a cake mix from a box. I pushed my ⅓ measuring up into the mix and poured vegetable oil into the divot it left behind. I was wishing I wasn’t using a prepared mix, but grateful that I could make these cookies practically with my eyes closed.

Rolling the incredibly thick dough into small cookie-size balls, I wondered: Are they really “my” cookies if they came from “Practically Homemade”? There’s weird morality placed on whether you bake something from scratch, or organically, or from a family recipe, or uncountable other qualifiers. God forbid you ever just buy baked goods for an event.

If the recipe isn’t mine, are the cookies really mine? If I buy premade-dough from the grocery store and put it in the oven, am I really baking? Is baking in the mixing, or the rolling, or putting it in the oven?

I think about this a lot as a designated baker in my friend group. I’m always flouring up my kitchen, putting piles of cookies into our biggest container, a salad drainer, and trading Tupperwares full of treats for empty, crumb-stuck ones.

I’ve come to realize: Those cookies mean just as much to my friends no matter where the ingredients or the recipe came from.

My family have always been bakers. I am someone lucky enough to have well-loved, handed-down family recipes from my mom’s side of the family. One of the biggest winners is “Nana’s Toffee Squares,” the Nana in question being my great grandma. Some other recipes, like my grandma’s potato rolls and several of her cookies, will make it to at least one more generation.

This month could be the perfect time to get your kids started baking – whether they use a family recipe or a mix from a box or even a family recipe that includes a mix from a box!

There is something magical in the idea that I could be creaming butter, folding in flour or kneading the dough in a mirror of women I’ve never met. It’s a tether of understanding tossed back to a Nana I’ve never met, or a Grandma I’ve never heard of, and that connection is possible in every family.

Is there some validity in the idea that homemade and passed down recipes are more special than one I stumble across when typing “crumbl copycat cookies” into Google? Is there something lesser in using a screenshot of a YouTube comment as a recipe? Will my Pinterest recipe board never live up to the delicate, stained recipes of my grandma’s?

I don’t think old recipes are better than new ones. Some of my favorite cookies in the world are ones my grandma on my dad’s side made, which are straight out of the Pillsbury tub. I love my YouTube Shorts recipes just as much as ones my grandmothers made, and I’ve certainly messed them up equally.

Even if a recipe isn’t connecting you to an ancestor, it’s connecting you to the person who wrote it, and anyone else who’s ever tried to make it.

When I’m busy clogging our sink with baking sheets and cooling racks, leaving sticky fingerprints on our white cabinets, and crouching to watch muffins rise fluffily in the oven, it doesn’t matter where the recipe came from. It doesn’t even really matter who will eat it. All that matters is I’ve created something, and someone will get enjoyment and energy from it.

Somewhere Joe is making cookies for his wife, from a recipe I sent him—and I’m actually glad it wasn’t a long, complicated, family-secret recipe; I’m glad it starts with a cake box. I’m glad we’re connected by the chocolate of “Practically Homemade.”

So don’t feel bad for a second for your Pinterest “copycat” recipes, or your store-bought dough, or even store-bought cookies! At the end of the day, no one can be mad if you brought dessert, right?