Baking with (Not Evil) Stepmothers
By Justine Thomas
@jtthomaswrites
“Don’t worry; she’s not evil,” my five-year old stepdaughter tells the cashier at the grocery store. She has a knack for pouring out her entire life story to any stranger who smiles in her direction.
In this case, the cashier has just told me I am a lucky mother to have such beautiful twins, and Clara—ever loyal to the truth—has informed her that I am not, in fact, their mother.
I’m not sure what compels her to tell uninterested cashiers and waitresses I am not evil, but I imagine it’s a line someone offered when she first found out her father was getting remarried. Before the reassurance, her overactive imagination probably found her in rags, picking lentils from the dust. Or maybe abandoned in the woods, about to encounter a candy-crazed, child-eating witch. Stepmothers, the stories tell you, are evil.
Ruby, my other stepdaughter, nods in agreement.
“Yeah, she’s nice,” she assures the cashier. The cashier believes them and lets me leave with my stepdaughters instead of whisking me away to dance in fiery iron shoes until I die.
We take our bags to the car and drive home. Once there, we pull groceries out of plastic bags, putting some away, arranging others on the counter in preparation.
Sometimes we make cupcakes. The first time we hosted dinner together, we made maple cupcakes for the occasion. They were excited to break the rules, to dump in as much maple syrup as we wanted into an otherwise vanilla recipe. We made the frosting, too runny at first, leading to more and more powdered sugar in the bowl, on the floor, on our faces.
Other times, we make brownies. Our favorite recipe is “Thomas Girls’ Best Brownies,” which are, in fact, the best brownies. I’m not sure where I found the recipe initially, but we made it ours with a whole bag of chocolate chips and a round cake pan instead of the recommended 8”x8”.
My stepdaughters frequently dash my dreams of being on Nailed It, the Netflix baking competition, telling me I’m too good at baking. I don’t tell them I am a fraud, that before them, I used box mixes for my baking endeavors. I don’t tell them I started baking from scratch because it felt like something a not-evil stepmother would do. That I wanted our brownies to be from scratch because parenting them felt like making brownies from a box.
When you bake from scratch, you are in complete control of the ingredients. I may follow a recipe, but, as I said, I like to break the rules. I choose how much sugar, how much vanilla, how many chocolate chips go into the batter. I choose the temperature and bake time. Sometimes I make mistakes. Sometimes I make miracles.
When you bake from a box, you only have partial control. Someone else has predetermined the mixture. Someone else gave my stepdaughters their genes, their early formative memories. Someone else fed them their first solid food and helped them take their first steps.
At first, I thought being a stepmother meant I would be resigned to second-rate parenthood, that I would not need—nor get—to put in as much work as their biological parents. In the months leading up to my wedding, I frequented a stepparent forum, where many well-meaning strangers told me I should take a disengaged approach, that parenting should be left to the bio-parents and that I should respect their role by just staying out of it.
However, I knew I wouldn’t be able to ignore the two five-year-olds in my apartment, so I decided to take part in their lives. I may have been unable to choose the ingredients, but I would still be allowed to whisk them together a bit.
A few years ago, on a night the girls were at their mother’s, I decided to utilize the French Vanilla box cake mix stashed away in the pantry for emergencies, which—given my craving—this was. Spoiled by too many elaborate baking projects with my stepdaughters and wanting something more, I remembered something I had come across during a fit of social media scrolling.
Box mixes can be upscaled.
To make your cake more rich and moist (a word I hate, except when used to describe cake), you can add an extra egg or egg yolk. I tend to add one of each. Replacing the water with milk or the oil with melted butter adds more fat, and thus more flavor and density. I replace both.
Box cakes are not bad, nor would my stepdaughters have turned out plain or boring had I not become part of their lives. Cake is cake, and cake is good. But I like to think my contribution has added richness, flavor, even density, to their lives.
Where their biological parents added the foundation for a love of literature—both their mother and my husband are readers and writers—it was me introducing them to Harry Potter on the annual car ride home from St. Louis one year that led to my stepdaughters’ bookshelf overflowing with fantasy books. I expanded on their existing family traditions by adding my own cultural influence. I introduced them to Studio Ghibli and a multitude of new flavors: curry, sushi, yakisoba, Japanese-style fried rice. Ruby even holds me responsible for the cleanliness of her desk, something my elementary school teachers would not believe considering the historic state of my childhood desks.
I am not better than or equal to their biological parents, but I am also not less than. I did not start the process or choose the primary ingredients, but I have left my mark on their lives.
We bake together, we create together, we adventure together. I throw them lavish birthday parties, transforming our small apartment into Hogwarts, Mount Olympus, fantastical forests. I hold them to high behavioral standards, but I also spoil them with gifts. Occasionally, they clean and do other chores, but never instead of attending a ball. We take walks in the woods, but I never abandon them there. I’ve accidentally given them an orange past its prime, but I do my best to avoid giving them poisonous apples. My husband and I did tell Clara “princess” was not a viable career option, but any boy who treats her like anything other than a princess will have to deal with me.
My favorite part of upscaling a cake is the addition of a teaspoon (or two) of extract, occasionally almond, mostly vanilla. It is not necessary, but a welcome addition. My stepdaughters were already wildly loved by their biological parents before I came along. Now, they have three loving parents.
My love was not necessary, per se, but it is the type of love only a (not-evil) stepmother can give.
Guest essay written by Justine Thomas. Justine lives in Massachusetts with her husband, her twin stepdaughters, and too many succulents. When she is not working as a school social worker, you can find her dragging her husband to new cafes to read, write, or play cards. She can bake, but you shouldn't ask her to make dinner unless you want takeout. You can find out more about her and her writing on her website or on Instagram.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.