Food is a Love Language

I’ve often thought that food should be the 6th love language. It’s security. It’s comfort. It’s a basic need, but it’s also more than just fuel for survival. It’s a labor of love.

One of my favorite movie scenes is from Napoleon Dynamite when Pedro decides to win Summer Wheatley’s affections by “build[ing] her a cake.” I saw the movie for the first time in high school, and since then, I’ve regarded that as peak romance. I’m a simple girl; build me a cake, maybe stealthily drop it off on my porch as you bicycle away into the sunset, and I’m yours.

I’ve made birthday cakes for my foster children when they lived with us, and I’ve made cakes for former foster children in the years since they’ve left. Here are a couple of cakes from birthdays of kids living with us:

And then the hardest ones for me were the cakes I made for former foster children. I dropped these off not knowing what I’d find when I opened the door. I’m not sure if mine was the only cake they had that year, and I wouldn’t know when I’d see them next. I tried to communicate everything I wanted to say in that one baked good.

I hope these amateur cakes communicate that there’s someone out there celebrating a world where they exist, and they’re worthy of being “built a cake.”