One of my favorite baking projects are my annual holiday cookie boxes, an assortment of intricately decorated holiday cookies. They’ve grown with me throughout my high school, and now college, career. They’re a festively sweet meter for how much I’ve changed as a person. I’ve been gifting these annual holiday cookie boxes to my extended family for the past few years, where I’ve been building up my culinary skill and repertoire. With the madeleines and macarons I now know how to make, I’ve come a long way from those first cookie boxes, crafted with the most uninspired sugar cookie recipes with sickeningly sweet royal icing.I’m determined to bake better cookies every year.

I know that this pressure is self-inducing, but I can’t help myself. Pleasing my family has been a far-away pipe dream; a castle in the sky. Since I was little, my queerness had set me apart from my aunts and uncles. They saw the dolls I used to play with as signs of a soft incompetency. And now, if I delivered lackluster cookies after years of consecutive improvement, I’d probably prove them right again. I would be some abnormality who couldn’t live up to some rigid expectation and bake up a pristine cookie box. 

Needless to say, for the 2024 holiday cookie box, I went all out. I started strategizing the cookies a good two weeks before I even touched a whisk. When I was supposed to be studying for my ECON121 final or writing my PLSC114 final essay, I was scouring Bon Appetit for the perfectly tangy lemon poppyseed madeleine recipe. 

On Christmas Day, I started to assemble the cookie boxes. The work itself was simple, but its  pace was relentless. And yet, there was something almost hypnotic about the hours spent in the kitchen, the steady movements of hands shaping dough, pressing filling, and coaxing heat from the oven. I sandwiched cranberry jam between matcha shortbread. I rolled caramel ginger molasses dough in sugar, watching it form into tight spirals, each one glistening as it turned golden. The macarons — pistachio, raspberry — were assembled with a precision that bordered on reverence, rows of shells lingering like unspoken promises. 

I worked non-stop for four days. The result was a kitchen counter covered with pistachio macarons, raspberry macarons, matcha-raspberry linzer cookies, caramel ginger molasses cookies, double-chocolate peppermint bark cookies, gingerbread, lemon-poppy seed madeleines, and cream puffs — all two hundred of them. I packed them carefully into white boxes, each sealed with a simple ribbon, and sent them off. 

I received rave reviews. 

When I handed over a box of cookies to my aunt, she gushed over the presentation: how the lined paper perfectly complements the colors of the macarons, or how she loves ginger molasses cookies. Not so coincidentally, she immediately switched the subject to ask me how I liked Yale so far. I answered in a typical avoidant nephew fashion — giving her enough to chew on but not enough for her to pry. She then asked me to weigh in on the San Francisco private school hierarchy for my cousin applying to high schools, because now my opinion matters.

My aunt’s interest in my cookies, my life, my opinions seemed to coalesce into this confusingly rehearsed dance. She compliments my cookies, but she also compliments me. I’m her Yale nephew who made these cookies. The nephew who did well in school, understands the college admissions process, and knows about baking. I became the missing ingredient, the one who could enrich the family’s name. For the first time, I felt like something carefully folded into their lives—essential, even cherished, like dough rising in the quiet heat of belonging.

This high did not last. Over the days following Christmas, splitting headaches left me bedridden and aches stung my skin. My limbs were weak and I couldn’t get out of bed. Four days of no sleep, no sustenance, and running around the kitchen non-stop had clearly levelled my body. The human body doesn’t become bionic for holiday cookie boxes. 

Baking literally induced me into a fever. My once untainted leisure now felt like work. There was no monetary benefit for my holiday cookie boxes, but I was still shackled to my own expectations. 

I wish I could say that perfectionism was the culprit, but I’m self-aware enough to recognize that I’m not really a perfectionist. I don’t GCAL my life, and I don’t do all my readings. If anything, I’m imperfect. And yet, there it is. Butter, sugar, and flour unearths some strain of perfectionism that I never knew existed—demanding precision, the right balance of ingredients, the delicate crisp that somehow feels like a reflection of the self I’m still trying to become — for my family and for myself.

It’s the desire to be the son and the nephew who is revered, golden, the one everyone seeks out. I had been unsure about my place in my family for so long, yearning to finally be taken seriously. For years, I had felt unmoored within my family, my position never fully solidified. There was a raw, insidious insecurity about where I stood, who I was in the eyes of those who mattered most. Yet, with each batch I bake, there is a fleeting sense that I can finally be seen in the way I’ve always wished to be. 

To me, raspberry macarons and lemon poppy seed madeleines are more than just French pastries; they are objects of defiance against the doubts that have long lingered about my character. Cookies, along with my Yale degree and my ambition, have the punch to disentangle an uncontrolled illusion about myself. I redefine this fatal illusion with a positive one, where my queerness and my feelings of inadequacy no longer define me, but rather the care I bake into each cookie. They hold the promise of erasing years of judgment, a symbol of becoming exactly who I always hoped to be.