Greetings, my name is Regina Coston and I am a junior here at CSUDH who is majoring in Interdisciplinary Studies/American Studies.

Ingredients: box of Betty Crocker™ SuperMoist™ yellow cake mix, egg, vegetable oil, real butter, brown sugar, crashed pineapples in juice, without cherry topping.

Food is times seen as a comfort food, I didn’t believe so when I was a young child and expected to learn how to cook. My younger sister and I was expected to stay in on the weekends and help my mother cook. I was tasked with prepping and my sister with standing on a chair and steering the food and wiping up. May mother prepared our meals from scratch and I remember thinking cooking requires way too much work. Cutting things up into small pieces, waiting on meat to thaw out, and even waiting on the oven or grease to heat up was way too much stress for someone like me. Cooking was such a sad task that I remember I would cry my heart out and my mom would say, “You’ll get over it”. How could there be comfort in cooking?

My mother cooked seven days a week and carted to each of our special tastes and dietary needs. It’s pretty funny now how I tried my hand at cooking and I sucked no matter how much patience my mother showed me. She would say a pinch of this and a dab of that and it would come out tasting like crap. My mother and I both knew that I would never live up to her way of cooking so she allowed me to try my hand at baking, thank God. I was surprised that baking was fun and it got me time in the kitchen alongside my mother on a much happier note. To top things off I was better at it than my siblings and they seem to love my experiments.

My siblings became my tasters and critics which helped me to improve my baking skills. I truly enjoyed making desserts from scratch as well as receipts from package and/or boxes. I started with simple things like Jell-O pudding with whipped cream, chocolate chip and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and moved my way up to cakes. I recently called and asked my siblings which desserts were their favorite and they agreed that they make more request, than we can remember, for upside down pineapple cakes which later turned into cupcakes. I know now that desserts helped to improve the mood of the house, so I will call this our childhood comfort feed.

We now relized that upside down pineapple cupcakes became the house favorite because my baby sister’s loved the size. I always loved to see the smile on her face when I would tell her they were ready and to see her face when she savored the taste put a smile on my face. Sweets became her comfort food and I could always make her feel better when I baked. As for my other siblings they loved sweets, sweets, sweets so they enjoyed the majority of my dessert, experiments, and had little complaints. Sweets would bring us together as a family and we were allowed to invite friends over to share in the excitement on the weekend.

I don’t bake as often these days except during major holidays and when I’m visiting my sister who now lives in Florida.