Bake off: Smeeding vS HartSHorne

MADI KIM, XI

From brownies and cakes to cookies and banana bread, baked goods are not only delicious, but fun to make and share with others. While CSG students enjoy eating baked goods from bake sales, clubs, and lunch, we can also recognize the art of baking and the experience that goes into perfecting the chocolate chip cookie.

Mrs. Hartshorne, the director of Middle School, is a well-known name at CSG when it comes to baking. She is an experienced baker, starting with her first job as a math teacher in which she would bake cookies for test days. She wanted to open her own bakery, but then she had kids, so she baked for them instead. During Covid, her baking career took a turn when she was baking a lot, yet there were few people to eat her treats.

So, she made 40 dozen cookies for her friend’s public school because “lunch isn't any good without a cookie!” After that, she explored

18 different kinds of cookies and it got to the point that she didn’t even need to reference a recipe. The following year, she started up “Grammy’s Goodies,” applied to a farmers market, and began selling her cookies at a couple coffee shops. Mrs. Hartshorne is clearly very experienced, and she advises amateur bakers to be willing to try something new, embrace failure, and dedicate time to perfecting a recipe.

Mrs. Smeeding, on the other hand, has a different experi- ence when it comes to baking and focuses on cakes rather than cookies. She began her baking journey in college for stress relief, and shared her treats with friends who were also stressed. While she took a little break from baking after college, she says “I re-got into it when I had Elenor because I wanted to make her first birthday cake.” Right now, she loves to decorate cakes because there are infinite possibilities for design and always new techniques to learn. She gets many tips and tricks from cool bakers on social media who post special features for the season, which pushes her to try new things. A controversial tip that she has found is “if you make something and it turns out disgusting, throw it away!” She defends this, though, because if you eat your gross creation, you’ll want to stop baking.

In the end, baking is about having fun and don’t be too hard on yourself if something doesn’t turn out. In the wise words of Mrs. Smeeding, “remember the joy of an easy-bake oven.”