Fifteen days before Valentine’s Day, I decided to make cupcakes. Love and cupcakes have coincided twice in my life. The first was in grade nine when my religion teacher earnestly told my class that as she chose to remain abstinent until marriage, she spent her college years baking her then-boyfriend cupcakes as a “virtuous” way to express her love. The second took place a year prior: I accepted an Instagram follow request from a boy I was almost in love with, who proceeded to like two out of my three posts. The lone offending photo? Two cupcakes, one strawberry and one mint-chocolate, side-by-side with the contrast turned all the way up and a hint of the Valencia filter. I deleted the post. 

I am the only person I know who enjoys the products of my baking. Over the past six years, I have attempted to regain my family’s trust after the infamous Oreo Cupcakes Incident of 2014; they had the colour, consistency, and taste of a freshly formed volcanic rock. I would not say I have improved. Today, eating one of my baked goods is like playing a game of Russian Roulette in which my family are unwilling participants and there is a bullet in every gun. 

The first annoying aspect of baking is that most of the recipes online provide measurements in cups. Having grown up in England, I am much more comfortable using grams. Every attempt to measure ingredients, therefore, begins with me frantically trying to recall how to divide fractions and ends with me pouring a grossly disproportionate amount of flour into a churned butter-sugar mix. Though I didn’t bake much in England, one cupcake-free Valentine’s Day stands out to me. My sister and I took the bus to school together every day. One of the regular passengers soon captured our attention; he was a cute boy who looked like a Labrador puppy and carried a rugby bag with the emblem of our neighbouring school. A few Facebook searches later and we found his profile. When February rolled around, our school offered a Valentine’s Day program where we could send roses to students that attended the neighbouring school. Of course, this was intended to be a cute service for couples, not a tool with which a pair of bored siblings could confuse and perhaps terrify an unknowing pupil. We sent him a rose using my full name. The idea was that he would search up the name on Facebook and, as I did not have a profile, he would find my sister’s profile instead, connect the dots, and possibly propose marriage. The day after the roses were sent out, we saw him on the bus and noticed with nervous excitement that he was constantly flipping his hair parting, which we took to be a sure sign that he had, in fact, connected the dots. The next week, we moved to Canada and never saw him again. I can only hope that absence makes the heart grow fonder and that when I go back to England, I do not have an eight-year-old restraining order waiting for me—though I would much prefer that than facing the reality that there is no possibility at all that he managed to connect the dots. 

The trickiest part of making cupcakes for me is cracking the eggs. I use the same knife to crack them that I use to cut the butter, causing them to become as slippery as if they had just popped out of a chicken. Cadbury Crème Eggs are much easier to work with; my only bake that is consistently mediocre are the Crème Egg brownies I make every Easter. The Easter holiday holds just as much romantic sentiment for me as Valentine’s Day. When I was nine years old, my sister, my school friend, and I attended a week-long church camp during Lent. We mostly rotated between various egg-related stations: painting patterns on hard-boiled eggs, sticking felt ears on an egg to make it look like a bunny, throwing rotten eggs at the biggest sinner, etc. On the last day, my friend’s cousin came up to me to let me know my friend was absent as she had fallen sick. He had skinny wrists and my sister said he looked like a potato. I fell in love with him immediately. During Good Friday Mass that same year, at the exact moment the priest read that Jesus “took his last breath”—after which everyone must kneel and bow their heads in solemn reflection—a Nokia ringtone rang out. I joined everyone in turning their heads to give the synchronized look of shame perfected by Catholic congregations, only to see that it was His phone! (Capitalization is used here to indicate that it was my crush’s phone, not the phone of God.) He frantically attempted to shut it off and I almost fainted. If you ever believed Valentine’s Day to be the most romantic day of the year, now you know better.  

I do not know why I insist on baking when I utterly detest the process, as if I am trying to prove a point to an evil high school home economics teacher who brandished their rolling pin at me in front of the whole class and declared: “You? You will never be a baker.” When I reach the point where the recipe calls for a “dash” of vanilla essence, I pour almost half the bottle out of pure spite. I also add yellow food colouring and realize it immediately to be a terrible decision; the batter has the consistency of stringy wallpaper glue, and the putrid yellow colour makes it resemble something one might find in a used tissue. Baking is a massive pain. Love is also pain—more specifically, the pain of slipping on freezing rain and slamming your head on the sidewalk. This happened to me as my grade six class was walking home from a community theatre performance of Annie.  When I slipped a second time, the boy walking next to me grabbed my arm and said, “Are you alright?” How many among us can say they literally fell in love? Six years later, his promposal to a grade nine went viral and I think he won a Swiss Chalet gift card because of it. Such is life.    

After twenty minutes, I take the cupcakes out of the oven. They look like decaying pineapples and retain the pasty texture that I had hoped the oven heat would even out—a thought that is a clear repercussion of my decision to drop high school chemistry. If I were more spiritual, I would take the fact that my Valentine’s Day bake has failed so spectacularly to mean 2020 does not bring great things for my love life. If I were more logical, I would realize that due to my lack of patience and culinary ability, nothing I bake can ever be interpreted as a good omen as it is doomed to fail. Above all, if I were more intelligent, I would not have taken a bite. It was disgusting.