I wanted to be a mother who bakes

And then I found out that it's illegal.

By Rachel Wray

Jan 2, 2001 | At first I thought she was just lazy.

Carol would rush into the office after dropping off cookies from the Safeway deli at her son's school. Or she would bring in lemon bars from a local bakery -- leftovers from last night's parent-teacher conference. I would give her a supercilious glance, pretending to understand how running errands and tending to her career could keep her from finding the time to whip up fresh-baked treats for school functions. But I wondered how a woman who seemed to otherwise have no aversion to cooking could skimp on the all-important school treats. Was she really so busy that she couldn't even pull out a box of cake mix?

Not me, I vowed. When I'm a mother, my children will go to school armed with carefully decorated cupcakes, cookies studded with chocolate chips and warm, lightly sugared gingerbread -- no box mixes, thank you very much. I'll stay up late icing butter cookies and get up early to drop them off in carefully packed tins. My love of cooking -- and my love for my future children -- would guarantee that no obstacle would keep me from mixing, baking and frosting a delectable assortment of goodies.

In short, I wouldn't be a Carol. And I wouldn't be my mother.

I thought back to the treats of my own school days: the bags of suckers, the boxes of Entenmann's, the cupcakes that came in a grocery store box with cellophane stretched clear and smooth across the top. My single mother's idea of preparing for the third grade Halloween party, or the student council meeting, or even my very own birthday party meant swinging by the Hy-Vee before dropping me off at school. With the purchased treats balanced precariously on my outstretched arms like an offering to the bake-sale gods, I would admire the other students' contributions: Alice's peanut butter cookies imprinted with fork tines, Tiffany's butter brickle wrapped in parchment paper and tied with different colored ribbons, James' still-warm snickerdoodles.

In the elementary school hierarchy, sweets were the edible symbols of our home lives. Lots of my friends had working mothers, but my mom worked two jobs. For her, getting dinner on the table was more important than putting sugar and starch in my classmates' tummies. Yes, I knew that my mom loved me. I just wished she could express that love in homemade cupcakes that all my classmates could share.

Don't get me wrong: I wasn't ostracized for bringing in a bag of Keebler this or that, and I'm not still suffering because of what my mom did or didn't bake when I was in the fourth grade. Probably no one else even noticed who brought what -- although we did live in small-town Iowa, where reputations were established on pie crusts. And yet I know that my kitchen dreams for my future children stem from those early morning trips to the grocery store, when my mom would grab a plastic box of cookies before pressing hard on the gas pedal, anxious to make it to work on time.

If how we parent is a reflection of our own upbringing, then I wanted to be what my mother could not be: a devoted baker of school treats, a tireless maker of crafts. Some people compare their incomes or cars or homes with the ones their parents had: I was going to compare my cupcakes. Shallow? Maybe. But delicious all the same.

I wondered if Carol's son might feel the same way someday. I convinced myself that surely he was mortified every time he had to show up at a school function with a brightly colored box filled with desserts made with hydrogenated vegetable oil.

Next Page: Germ warfare with baked goods

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