What do cakes have to do with creativity?

What do cakes have to do with creativity?

Both are “a piece of cake”, but “not a piece of tart”. In other words, they’re “easy”, but “not obvious”.

Let’s categorize two people. They both bake cakes, which already makes them pretty likeable. The first person follows recipes to the letter. The second one never does. Each is intrigued by the other. Neither really understands the other, or quite understands how their baking style can even work out.

Let’s call them Black Forest (Cake) and Clafoutis.

Black Forest has one goal: to do things correctly. She (forest is grammatically feminine in french, so she is she) follows the rules to the letter. She has immense faith in the recipe. She sees it as infallible, an authority figure, while she herself is a person, therefore fallible. Therefore totally capable of messing up the recipe and the cake. This person is motivated by the prospect of having a good cake to share with her friends. And by her fear of failure.

Clafoutis, on the other hand, takes great pleasure in experimenting. He has an idea of the desired result, and believes that “the end justifies the means”. Of course, he has had his fair share of wandering off course and problems, the cake not being cooked enough, too sweet, too dry. But he has also had some lovely surprises, improvising with whatever ingredients were available and whatever happened to be in the fridge. When he gets a compliment, he doesn’t say, “Yes, it was a good recipe.” He knows it worked because of all his previous experience and the experiments he tried that day.

Note: the German vs. French cake names, Black Forest and Clafoutis, were chosen at random ;) The gender split is the opposite of my subjective anthropological observations, which suggest that it is men who tend to stick to the recipe. Also, you’re more likely to behave like Clafoutis if you grew up watching your parents cook, don't you think? There’s a Korean proverb that goes: “Keep adding until your ancestors tell you to stop.”

So what does this tell us? I’m sure both of them make good cakes. Now let’s transpose this to foreign languages or drawing.

There you go, please read the whole thing again while imagining them taking up drawing/urban sketching or trying to master the condicional compuesto.

Someone like Black Forest will wait until they can speak perfectly before opening their mouth. A Clafoutis will… well, making mistakes, and learning that they are mistakes, can save an enormous amount of time when learning a language. And, above all, it means you actually speak. Your speaking exists.

And when it comes to drawing or creativity, I imagine Clafoutis would be open to trying lots of things, adjusting along the way, and surprising everyone around him including himself.

This whole cake story came out of a mash-up of conversations about cakes, my newsletter challenge thanks to Struthless Alphabet Superset, and my reading of Léa Munsch’s Instagram. She’s a sculptor who shares glimpses of the forests around her studio in Lorraine. Somewhere, she wrote something along the lines of “allowing yourself to…” when you experiment. Was it a story? I can’t remember, and I can’t find it again.

I thought about it while eating a cake. I definitely love experimenting. That much is certain. I put this thought close to another one, thinking about some of my language students who would never experiment. What do I allow myself to do when I experiment? What do I give myself permission to do when I draw?

When I allow myself to fail, then...
I give myself a chance to succeed?

Long live failed cakes, stepping outside comfort zone, and entering the fun of the zone of proximal development, taking small steps, not necessarily huge leaps.

AND YOU?

Do you follow the recipe when you bake a cake?


Inspiration
Struthless Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@struthless
Lea Munsch Insta https://www.instagram.com/lea.munsch