06/10/2025
Lately, every time I bake something with my mom, I wonder if this is the last time we will be doing this activity together. For a little over a month, I have spent an afternoon each week baking with her. This is something we did a lot for years and years. She was “the hands” in many of the images I took for clients when they needed step-by-step photos! But now, we bake with dementia. What used to be an enjoyable activity for my mom (and us) is now one that is riddled with anxiety, confusion, frustration, grief, and uncertainty. She doesn’t seem to recall ever baking even though she has done so much of it! It’s literally impossible for her to do alone. Even a seemingly simple, repetitive step like putting flour in a bowl or rolling scoops of cookie dough in sugar to coat them is extremely challenging. I am not sure it is enjoyable for her anymore, even with me by her side to guide her, showing her what to do over and over again… and so every session has been laced with grief 😕
Despite it all, we did bake hundreds of drop cookies in the last weeks from the archive of my blog, then we sat down together to drink tea and sample what we had made. We baked:
* peanut butter cookies (with a mix of milk and dark chocolate chips instead of white chocolate)
* chocolate chip cookies (with walnuts instead of pecans)
* molasses ginger cookies (which I baked at the wrong temp so they spread)
* chocolate chocolate chip cookies (which was a messy endeavour I almost regretted)
* oatmeal raisin cookies (so delicious and comforting)
All the recipes are on my site and they all have notes and step-by-step photos in case you need them. This carousel features the styled and edited photos from my blog side-by-side with the cookies we baked in real time with very little editing so you can see the real results! I think we did pretty good and we should pat ourselves on the back for that. And at the end of the day, we had cookies that we made together to share and enjoy, and at this point, we take what we can get. 🍪
