My Kid's Baking Class, or, a Growth Mindset isn't for the Weak

fresh homemade croissant filled with prosciutto and cheese

Want to know yet another of my fun neuroses?

I don't like to see people praised for qualities like talent, intelligence, or beauty. Like, I'm not a psychopath--I tell my children and my husband that they're talented at whatever and they're smart and they're attractive, etc., but those are meant to be just, you know, the kind of compliments that make sure people know they're loved and awesome and appreciated.

But it's not, like, good or bad to be those things. People are also born the way that they're born, and they can't help how they're born. In my mind, if someone shows you, say, a test that they earned a good grade on and you say something like, "Oh, you're so smart!", you're really just pointing out that they didn't work hard for that grade because all they have is a natural knack for the material. 

This is 100% related to my childhood fucked-upness because hey, guess who got praised all the time for being smart and then about lost her damn mind when shit got difficult in college? I'll give you a hint: it's the same person who also got told all the time that she was fat and was not pretty, so I have first-hand knowledge that being called out on stuff you can't help is not the road to excellent mental health.

So for my kids' whole lives, whenever I've seen a knack emerge or a talent unfold, it's really important to me that when I encourage them, I'm encouraging them for what they've done to improve, not the simple fact of a condition they were born with. And whenever someone praises them for being smart or a good artist or looking pretty or whatever, I am 100% that nag who reminds them that it's what they do with their DNA-given amenities that's important. I have literally looked my children in the eyes and told them, straight-faced and unironically, "With great power comes great responsibility. You must use your powers for good." THAT'S how bad it is around here. 

I was kind of relieved, honestly, the other day when I started to say something about a recent compliment and my kid interrupted me to irritatedly note that, "Yes, Mom, I know it's nothing to my credit and the important thing is how hard I've worked to achieve this result! UGH!" She wouldn't be quoting me with such annoyance if she hadn't internalized the message, right?

I mean... right? Ahem.

ANYWAY, all this to say that my kid has been using her powers for SO MUCH PERSONAL GOOD lately! The kid has always had a knack for cooking, particularly baking. She likes the precision required to achieve perfect results, and she likes the artistry also required. Just between us, I also think it lends itself well to her own personal brand of pickiness, in which she wants to eat only the thing that she wants to eat and it must also be delicious and also look exactly right. 

When a kid seems to have a talent or interest in something, enrichment and challenge are the two ways to turn it into something that IS to their credit, so I've always tried to do that with this kid and cooking. She's had a lot of great experiences, but I, personally, don't have anything to teach her in that regard, being, alas, a miserable cook with zero interest in improvement, and she's never really liked children's cooking camps or classes, because she's never really found the work to be at a high enough level with the "proper" emphasis on perfection.

Junior year of high school has so far always felt like a good time for my homeschooling kids to start taking a real college class or two, and this kid actually started the summer before, when the local community college unexpectedly offered their entire summer course catalog free to current high school students. She'd wanted to take both Intro to Baking and its pre- or co-requisite, a ServSafe Manager Certification course, but alas, the baking class was cancelled so instead she chose to learn about serial killers while also becoming ServSafe certified.

And then in the fall I forced her to take a college art class, also in service of challenging and enriching one's innate gifts. 

So not until this spring semester was my kid finally able to put her ServSafe certification to use by FINALLY enrolling in this much longed for, much anticipated Intro to Baking class.

If I had known what would come home from those school kitchens, I would have moved heaven and earth to make this class happen sooner. Because OMG. It's like living in an expensive French bakery over here.

Check out these loaves!

The sandwich bread and dinner rolls!

The doughnuts, some filled!

And I'm not even going to lie--I teared up when I bit into this croissant, filled with homemade chocolate hazelnut spread, fresh from the oven and still warm:

Each baked item this kid has brought home has been the most delicious baked item I have ever eaten. Her cinnamon rolls were better than Cinnabon's. Her sandwich bread was better than Dave's Good Seed's. Slap my face, but her dinner rolls were better than Aunt Fannie Sue's. 

And she's got all this knowledge, now, of how stuff is supposed to be. She's reading her textbook and listening to the lectures and telling me about the baker's percent of salt in a recipe and hydrating your dough and why you should punch it down, all this stuff that I've never known and never even fathomed was something that could be known. 

I made a batch of apple muffins over the weekend, mostly because apparently only my college kid was doing her duty with the apples so we suddenly had several extremely puny-looking ones in the fruit bowl that nobody in their right mind was going to eat out of hand, but also because I thought that people might like muffins. And people ate them okay, but they for sure weren't delicious. I think I didn't use enough oil, and they were definitely too dry so I probably overbaked them, too? So I mentioned the uneaten muffins last night, as a reminder that they still existed and we needed to force-feed them to ourselves the next morning, and my kid was all, "Oh, right! We're actually making muffins in my class tomorrow!"

My immediate thought was, "Oh, shit! I will never be able to make a muffin again! Everyone will know that my batter wasn't hydrated and my baker's percentage of baking soda was off and I don't know how to cook!"

But you know what? That's the young me talking, the little kid who thought that smart is something that you were, not something that you did. What I'm ACTUALLY going to do when my kid brings home her beautiful batch of muffins in a few hours, the ones that will look and taste a thousand times better than my dry, hard apple muffins, is praise them for how beautiful they are and how delicious they taste, ask my kid a billion questions about how she did such and such to get such and such, compliment her for the work she put into improving her skills and achieving such a perfect result...

... and then ask her to teach me to make delicious and beautiful muffins, too. Tbh I'd kind of rather continue to bake sub-par muffins than take the time and effort to learn the skill properly, but we must let the kids see us practicing a growth mindset if we want them to do it, too, sigh and ugh.