Funny how even a cake can remind you of people.
I make these little cheese tarts often. Over the years they have become one of those things I make almost without thinking. I usually bake them individually because they freeze beautifully, and I like knowing there is always something tucked away in one of my freezers.
An unexpected guest arrives, someone stops for coffee, or I simply decide I want something sweet, and there they are. Usually, they come out of the oven looking exactly as I expect them to. Neat little rounds. Nicely risen. Fruit arranged on top. Almost identical to one another, perfect you might say.
This time I had a little more cheese than usual. Rather than leave it behind, I adjusted the recipe slightly and filled the little tins more generously. I wasn’t experimenting. I certainly wasn’t trying to create anything new. But apparently the tarts had other ideas.
As they baked, they rose above the tins and spread over the edges. The flat peaches shifted and settled into the tops, and when I took the tray from the oven, instead of my usual tidy little tarts, I had twelve wonderfully peculiar creations. Some leaned slightly to one side. Some had wider tops. Some were taller than others. The peaches had found their own places. Not one looked exactly like the next. I stood there looking at them and I loved them.
They hadn’t gone wrong. They tasted exactly as they should. They simply no longer fit neatly within the shape I had expected them to have. In fact, the more I looked at them, the more I thought they were far more interesting this way. And somewhere between taking them out of their tins and dusting one with powdered sugar, I started thinking about people.
How much of our lives do we spend trying to fit the mold?
From the time we are young, there seems to be some invisible outline waiting for us. How we should look. How we should behave. What we should accomplish. When we should marry, work, succeed, settle down, grow older. We learn very early that fitting neatly inside the edges makes life easier. So we smooth ourselves out.
We hide some things. Restrain others. We compare ourselves with the people around us and sometimes mistake sameness for correctness. Perhaps that is why perfection can be so terribly predictable. Because when everything fits the mold exactly, something else can disappear along the way.
Character.
The people I find most interesting have rarely lived perfectly symmetrical lives.
There is usually an unexpected turn somewhere. A decision others didn’t understand. A rough edge they never quite polished away. Something they survived. Something they changed. Something they refused to become. Those are often the very things that make them memorable. Age has made me appreciate that more.
There was probably a time when I thought becoming older meant becoming more settled, more finished somehow. Instead, I think the opposite may be true.
If we are fortunate, perhaps we become less concerned with fitting neatly inside the edges.
We become more willing to recognize what is genuinely ours and what we have simply been carrying because someone once told us we should. We stop correcting every irregularity. We become a little more ourselves.
My cheese tarts certainly did that.
They rose beyond their little molds, settled into twelve different shapes and came out looking nothing like the perfectly uniform ones I had made so many times before.
And I couldn’t stop looking at them.
Perhaps perfection has its place, But give me something with a little character.
I think I like it better that way.