PEOPLE MY AGE ARE GETTING MARRIED OR PREGGERS AND I CAN'T DEAL (also, I made macarons)

While you might think it's impossible to expound any further upon such a title, you underestimate just how self-aggrandizing I can be.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's step back a little bit.

First of all - I made macarons:

Twice:

So, last entry, I told you that I went to NYC two weekends in a row.  The first instance was actually during a macaron class at Sur La Table.

C making ganache under the fine tutelage of our instructor

After drooling over macarons from Laduree, Financier, etc., I had resolved to figure out just went into these $3/piece cookies.  After browsing recipes online, I quickly realized that this wasn't something that I'd be able to cobble together, just like that.  So, C and I decided that we would try to find a class to take together, and that is exactly what happened.

My impression at the time was, fortunately, macaron making wasn't exactly the most complex activity, per se.  It just involves a great many steps.  Of course, it probably helped tremendously that we had a professional pastry chef guiding us through the process, ensuring that the cookies that we made in store were nigh flawless.

Armed with my newly acquired knowledge, two weekends ago, I decided to hazard a go at it myself.  Surprise, surprise, it wasn't nearly as simple in the comforts of my own home.  Like I said, there is much that needs to be done.  Prepping the meringue (in which, you can't get a single ounce of butter/oil, or the suspension will keep it from peaking), mixing the batter to the right consistency, piping all the cookies to the same dimensions, letting them set, baking them without burning anything, cooling, and then piping the filling.

Speaking of the meringue, I learned two nifty tidbits.  First - best way to separate the yolk from the white?  With your hand:

YUMMEH.

Second - you know a meringue is the right consistency when you can do this without fear:

OH GOD I CAN HEAR THE CARPET CRINGE

Needless to say - not a task for the impatient.  For example, I apparently didn't let one of the batches set long enough, and this is what happened:

See more at my photobucket

On the left, the cookies formed just right - raised a bit with a little "pied".  On the right, they spread out into these kind of blobbular discs.  Don't get me wrong - they still taste great, but they're just not quite correct.

Anywho.  So how does this all tie into my weird anxieties about babies and weddings?  Well.  It doesn't exactly.  Mostly, I wanted to show off that I made cookies.  But also, feminism.

You're probably thinking, "Feminism, what?"  So, I think most of us can agree that I'm not the most effeminate female.  I think I not-so-unconsciously lend to this image in a number of ways, except in one major realm - I bake like I'm some Debbi-Fields-in-training.  And yeah, obviously guys bake too, or else we wouldn't have people like Buddy Valastro, but I think if we took a look at the overall stats, we would see a skew pretty heavily in favor of the lady types making the baked goods.

Should that matter?  Ideally, no, but even as forward-thinking as many people are in this day, it's hard not to defer to stereotyping over some things.  I'm well aware that I've been known in some roles, not as "that engineer", but as "that girl who bakes a lot".  And that is, to some extent, an accurate portrait.  What worries me isn't that I personally am being viewed as a Susie Homemaker, but that somehow, despite being female in a largely male-dominated profession, I've somehow taken a giant step back for all women in the Western world.

Just to clarify, feminism, as I see it, is "the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men."  I do NOT see myself as being oppressed in any way based on my gender.  I don't spell it "womyn" or "herstory".  I'm just afraid that convention means that I will automatically always be the slightest bit undermined because my bits don't dangle.  That undermining might not even necessarily be on purpose.  But, there will always just be that subconscious expectation - one that many women I know are starting to fill.

There's nothing wrong with getting married.  There's nothing wrong with having babies.  Both are things I want to do eventually.  EVENTUALLY.  So then what's my problem?  Well, what weirds me out is that girls that I went to school with are already having/have had children/marriages/whatnot.  Why am I so irked?  Because I can't decide if I fell off some sort of "normal"-train by trying to play ball with the boys.  I omitted this in my last entry, but at NES, I had a conversation with several of the girls there about getting married.  I, along with another girl, strongly agreed that we weren't ready.  Her argument was that she was too selfish.  Mine was that I was still trying to figure out my own life - how could anyone expect me to start figuring out how to compromise with theirs as well?  Or be responsible for a child? On paper, that sounds selfish, but that's the reality of it.

Meanwhile, every time we don't come home with a rock on our hand, my parents not-so-subtly hint that if neither my sister nor I start something soon, our ovaries are going to mutate into Quasimodo-baby factories of despair (despite the fact that our folks were the ones that urged us into demanding professions.) 

So what's a girl to do?  I want to focus on my development as an engineer, but at the same time, physiologically, my body is probably in peak condition for some kiddies.  I want to be taken seriously, but I love taking baked goods to work.

I guess I don't have an answer right now for that first conundrum, but for the latter... well...  In the end, does it matter whether or not I accidentally fall into some archaic definition of a social sphere?  Possibly.  Does my baking really lend that much to people viewing me as an archetypal woman?  Probably not.  Am I going to stop baking?  Hell, no!

But... maybe if I really want to be "that engineer girl who bakes a lot", it should be a little less of

Except the hair.  I can only dream of such locks.

And a little more of this. (Thanks to Scott-sempai for showing me this little snippet.)

'Til the next.