This Designer Couldn't Bake So She Makes The Most Adorable Tiny Dollhouse Food

Have you been baking a lot since quarantine began? We’re not surprised. Baking is great therapy and one that lets your creative juices flow. You can play around with myriad flavors, textures, colors, shapes—not to mention flavor and aroma. “The smell of spices and vanilla are comforting, and [they] often remind us of happy times. Olfactory scents are particularly linked to areas of the brain that involve emotions and memory,” says clinical psychologist Dr. Mary McNaughton-Cassill in an interview for Delish. The entire baking process is magical. “Mixing inert substances together and watching them rise can bring out the mystic or the chemist in all of us.”

So Rebecca Ackermann decided to give it a try. At first, the designer-and-writer had fun with no-knead breads, frittata, and double-chocolate cookies, but she eventually realized that baking is not her cup of tea. “Still, sometimes my family didn’t want to eat what I made, or it looked funny, or worst of all, it tasted bad and I didn’t know why,” she admits in her own article in The New York Times.  “Cooking was no different from scrubbing dishes or supervising Zoom preschool. It was just another thing I was failing at.”

What to do? She began to jump from hobby to hobby, covering tie dyeing, yoga, face painting, and coloring books. One day, she sat down with her daughter to make miniature fruits, cookies, and spaghetti from polymer clay and found it a joy to do. And Rebecca’s new hobby was born: creating miniature food—from pasta and bento boxes to sandwiches and sweet treats.

Since she’s busy making mini food, it’s her husband who takes over the kitchen. “I started to stay up too long after everyone’s bedtime making beautiful meals I could never master at life size,” she shares. “It was the first time in a long time I was really alone, the first time my mind was still. The only thing at stake was my own satisfaction.”

Rebecca follows chefs online for a creative boost, and she experiments with different techniques to improve her next piece. “It’s a lesson I’m still learning at the end of every stage, horrible or hopeful day in quarantine, when I sit down with my clay and my little tools and I try again to make one small piece of the world just right.”

Scroll through the gallery below for some of her most charming works: