Cupcake Pressure
Key Insights
We often make our lives more difficult to meet expectations we think others have
Meeting social expectations is even harder if you have a different cultural background
My youngest turns two on Friday. For each kid’s birthday, the daycare teachers typically share pictures of impressive cupcake towers, with extra accolades if the cupcakes are home-made. I feel the pressure. I hear a little voice in my head say that if I want my little girl to have a good birthday, she needs home-baked cupcakes.
So I’m baking cupcakes. I’ll have to do it on Wednesday night, because I will be in the office late on Thursday for an MBA event. I know very little about cupcakes. It had just started to become popular when I left the Netherlands. Or maybe I wasn’t really up to speed on baking trends. Very possible. Either way, to me, cupcakes are a North American thing, and I have 28 years less experience with North American things than most moms around me.
When I was a little kid, my mom baked mini cakes for birthdays, which were wider and flatter than cupcakes. Each kid got to decorate their mini cake with whipped cream and a bunch of Smarties. Aren’t those wider and flatter cupcakes, you might say? No, because there is no icing involved. I’m generally not a European snob complaining about North American cuisine, but I draw the line at icing. Why even bother baking the cupcakes if you put so much sugary drab on them that all you taste is sugar?
When I told my husband about my plan to bake mini cakes with whipped cream and sprinkles, he looked at me somewhat puzzled. “Will that even hold up? And what if none of the kids like them?” I highly doubted that any two-year-old would have a problem with cake and whipped cream, so stubborn as I am, I ignored his comments. On Wednesday night, when I started making the batter, my 9-year-old asked me what kind of icing I was going to use. “There will be no icing”, I snapped. “I’m going to use whipped cream because that’s what I’m used to”. He was less politically correct than my husband and said, “But she is Canadian. In Canada, we eat icing”. Two against one. I declared defeat and asked my husband to pick up icing.
So on Thursday night, when I came home around 8:30 pm, I jumped on decorating cupcakes with icing, still in my biking gear from my commute back home. I even added food coloring to make nice pink icing, and finished it with some sprinkles on top. They looked like they could pass the North American test.
My husband and I took her to daycare together on the morning of her birthday, so that I could bring in the cupcakes undamaged. The teachers looked at the Tupperware boxes, then looked back up, excited. “You baked them yourself?!” I sure did. Just for this very moment, to not feel the shame of handing over store-baked cupcakes.
In the car on the way back home, I asked my husband why they hadn’t asked him whether he had baked the cupcakes. He remarked that I was the one carrying the Tupperware. But I wasn’t mad at the staff. They had seemed genuinely excited that I had baked the cupcakes myself. I was mad at myself for letting expectations about being a good mom get to me so much. The last three days had been about stupid cupcakes, how to bake them, when to bake them, and how to deliver them. “Next year”, I told my husband, “we are taking your mom up on her offer to bake number-3 cookies”.
But when daycare sent videos and pictures of my glowing girl, seated behind a tower of pink cupcakes with sprinkles, and surrounded by her friends, I had second thoughts. At least I know the recipe now, I told myself. I’m sure it’ll get easier each year. Or, maybe my husband can have a shot next year. He is better at following recipes anyway.