Do you think the Germans have a word for the emotion that is having chocolate all over your fingers in the summer? From a warm chocolate chip cookie? After playing pickleball with some new friends turning into old ones?
It’s probably 67 characters long, but I bet they do have a word for it. If they don’t, I’ll start the petition.
Components to this cocktail include: joy crossed with contentment, childhood being recreated actively instead of passively this time, and physical and emotional warmth. Good sticky from the chocolate and unavoidably sticky from the gallons of sunscreen. A tinge too much competitiveness, and relief that you appear to have hidden it well. A quiet wish that you could have played badminton instead, because you’re better at that. And chocolate. Don’t forget the chocolate.
I needed something quick — the text chain was working out our meeting time as I was browning the butter. Although I don’t know why I live under the mistaken impression that making a browned butter cookie is faster than creaming the butter. It’s… not? Even if you don’t wait for the butter to cool (thanks, Sarah, we do appreciate it), you still have to melt it and then babysit it all through the browning processing. Which isn’t instantaneous. If it were you would be burning butter. I can do that no sweat.
But a sheet finished baking before I had to run out of the house. The cookies were beat to hell by the time I opened them after pickleball, since they’d rattled around in the Tupperware in my backpack for over an hour at that point. But nobody cared. Nobody ever does.
There were tacos and margs and cookies. It was summer as summer was meant to be.
In The Duff, Bianca asks the popular girl about her party invitation, “Wait, this is a Wednesday? You’re having a party… on a school night?”
Madison rolls her eyes and replies, “Yeah…. I can do that.”
You can do that.
high-bar baking 
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