Sweet, warm smells were rolling out of X Kitchen last Tuesday as students learned how to bake bread with Resident Advisors (RAs) Rose Marz and Delaney Anderson. The event, which invited students to try their hand at baking and to bring their homework while they waited for their goodies to come out of the oven, was funded by the Student Allocations Committee and inspired by a cold winter Marz spent studying abroad in Montreal last year.
“It was really, really cold and I only had class two days a week, so I didn’t go outside and I baked in my apartment … it was the only way to keep my apartment warm enough to live in,” Marz said. “And then Delaney came up to me one day this semester and was like, ‘Rose, we should make bread [and] we should make an RA event out of this because baking bread is life skill that many students at New College really need to get a handle on.’ And I said, ‘Delaney, that is a wonderful observation.’ And so we decided to do it.”
Originally, Anderson stated that a good turnout would be about five to 10 people. The event garnered seven students who all got the opportunity to learn how to make bread dough, knead their own and watch it rise in the oven. Instructions were also printed out so that the students could take them back home in case they wanted to try and bake for themselves. This was also not the first time that Marz and Anderson had thrown events in X Kitchen. Last year, Marz said, they hosted a series of events that would help Novocollgeans learn basic life skills that would greatly help them in their college life.
Second-year Angelica Alexander told the Catalyst that she found the Bread Baking Workshop to be a very “chill” experience and would later attempt to bake zucchini bread on her own time.
“Looking at the bread come out [of the oven] and knowing that you helped make this … it was beautiful,” Alexander said. “I thought it was a lot of fun. Some of us did homework in there. I did a little homework in there. There was a lot of talking, it was fun.”