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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #125 (Cake)

Published 5 days ago • 5 min read

1 Family Photo:
Cake Bake

One of Luana's superpowers is baking cakes from scratch and making it seem effortless.

She'll see a picture of a cake on Pinterest or Instagram and then just decide to make it.

When I look at flour and butter and sugar, that's all I see—flour and butter and sugar. But when Luana looks, she sees the building blocks of a baked good. She sees proportions needing to be meted out to make the perfect batter. She sees an edible work of art not yet formed.

The kids want to help? Let them. They're no distraction. This is a learning opportunity. They make a mess? That's fine. They're learning. That's how they learn. Let them learn.

Can you get the broom please? Let's measure again.

--

I tease that she should have her own YouTube channel: Super-easy with Luana.

When she shares a photo of her latest cake creation in the family WhatsApp chat, one of the aunts will respond with praise, asking: "How do you do that Luana?"

Luana replies with a voice message that always starts: "It's super-easy Tia! You just mix flour, sugar, butter, couple eggs, and then..."

And then...five minutes into her message, after explaining the nuances of making ganache, Luana will finish with something like: "Then you put whipped cream on top. You can buy whipped cream from the store, but I like to make my own. It's super-easy! You just have to mix heavy cream with some sugar and vanilla and then..."

I stare blankly at her when she stops recording. Which part was super-easy?

--

"Daddy, I want pancakes," Calvin says, waking up on a school day.
"I don't think we have any pancake mix," I say. "Maybe we can have cereal?"
"That's OK," Calvin answers. "I'll ask Mom."

"Mom, can you make pancakes? And maybe you can put some healthy things in them?"

And she does! Luana makes whole wheat pancakes with walnuts. Luana makes oatmeal pancakes with dark chocolate chips. Luana makes Hulk pancakes, which are green because they have spinach in them—and also happen to be delicious—but we can't talk about the spinach in them because our kids are prejudiced against the produce that powered Popeye's muscles.

Super-easy.

--

In psychology, there's a learning model called the four stages of competence. As we progress in skill acquisition, we move from (1) Unconscious Incompetence, we're bad at something and don't even know we're bad at it to (2) Conscious Incompetence, we recognize we're bad at something and also recognize the value of getting better at it to (3) Conscious Competence, we know how to do something, but doing it requires great concentration to (4) Unconscious Competence, we are so practiced at a skill that it becomes second nature and can be performed easily, even while performing another task at the same time.

I recognize I don't know how to bake, at least not without pancake mix or a very explicit recipe. That puts me in stage 2: at least I'm halfway there.

With practice, maybe one day my baking will become...a piece of cake!

1 Dad Joke:
Piece of Cake

What's the best way to make new friends at a party?
Bring a cake and break the icing.

*image by Dad[AI]Base​

Highlights:
Cake Party

​So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself by Adam Mastroianni​

Sometimes people will be like, “Well, whatcha gonna do, life is suffering,” and I’ll be like, “Haha sure is,” waiting for them to laugh too, but they won’t laugh, and I’ll realize, to my horror, that they’re not joking. Some people think the bog is life!
​
I get why you might think this if you’ve experienced lots of misfortune. If you, say, survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then took the train to Nagasaki just in time for the atomic bombing of that city, too, you'd probably have a gloomy outlook on life.4​
​
But most of the people I know who feel this way haven’t survived any atomic bombings at all. They’re usually people with lots of education and high-paying jobs and supportive relationships and a normal amount of tragedies, people who have all the raw materials for a good life but can’t seem to make one for themselves. Their problem is they believe that satisfaction is impossible. Like they’re standing in a kitchen full of eggs, flour, oil, sugar, butter, baking powder, a mixer, and an oven, and they throw their hands up and say, “I can’t make a cake! Cakes don’t even exist!”

​Why Does This Website Exist? by Theodore Gray​

In the past a child could make a wagon, or a cake, or a whatever as good as any you could buy. Children could feel a real sense of accomplishment knowing that they really could do as well as the grown-ups around them. From this could spring the genuine belief that they too would one day take their place in the world, and that is the very definition of self-confidence.
​
But the intricacy, sophistication, and sheer technical finesse of the everyday objects surrounding our children have raised the bar for meaningful contribution. Have you ever looked inside a laptop computer? It's scary.
​
How any child is supposed to imagine growing up to build things like that is beyond me. We crossed a threshold of sorts when the working parts of many common household items, including the average doll, become invisible to the naked eye (and today have sunk below the wavelength of visible light for crying out loud).
​
You might say that the man-made objects in a child's environment have become almost as opaque to understanding as the biological ones, their working bits nearly as tiny, intricate, and seemingly beyond human perception. Yet someone made these things. That must be pretty intimidating, once a child is old enough to comprehend it.​
​
But kittens aren't intimidating, and technology doesn't have to be either. We just have to find the levels at which it can be understood, then deepen those layers bit by bit.

​School Is Not Enough by Simon Sarris​

A close look at social media reveals ample opportunity for self-apprenticeship. We live in an era where a motivated 12-year-old can learn the basics of timber framing, semiconductor design, or how to bake bread that would rival world-class bakeries. They can master nearly any mechanical system or any number of programming or artistic vocations, even if no mentor lives nearby. The limit is no longer some teacher or institution but a child’s own patience and interest, as well as the interested support of the parents.

​The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too) by Hannah Gamble​

Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:​
​
​[Writing about a family member's recent death:]
"My brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.”
​
​[Writing about a terminal illness:]
"I am feeling burdened
and I taste milk……
I mumble, ‘Please,
please run away.’
But it lives where I live.”
​
​[Writing about life as a movie:]
"The choir enters, and the director screams
'Sing with more terror!!!'”
--
The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn't been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.
--
Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”​
​
The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.
​
​The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.

iamJoshKnox Luana Highlight:

Looking through our cake photo collection, I found we had complete documentation of a KitKat cake Luana made for my dad's birthday a few years ago—from inspiration to presentation. It seemed appropriate to put the pictures together in a grid.

*image by Dad[AI]Base​

Want to Chat?

Reply with a photo of something you've baked!

...or grab some time on my calendar and share a story this week:

​Let's Chat!​

Book some time even if you don't know what you want to talk about:
​https://calendly.com/iamjoshknox​

Until next week,
​iamJoshKnox​​

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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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