Craft Corner with Veronica Kruschel ‘25
by Jizelle Villegas ’26
For this month’s Craft Corner, The Words sat down with Veronica Kruschel ’25 to talk about her creative side in cooking and baking and how creating things in the kitchen is connected to creating things on paper as a Creative Writing and Psychology double major.
We were curious to know how Veronica started out cooking and baking, which foods she’s made that have come out great and what her favorite thing to make recently has been. Veronica said, “I’ve baked since I was a little kid, like with my dad. Cooking I got into when I moved off campus. And so I cook most nights for my roommates. It’s just satisfying to make things that other people enjoy.”
Over the summer, she got a chance to explore baking different cakes, now that she got mini cake pans and had different flavor combinations to try out. “I thought of the sillier flavors. So I did sage and blackberry.” That sounded like an interesting cake flavor, one that probably tasted and looked good. For another interesting cake, she tested out a pumpkin cake flavor as an option for her and her roommates’ upcoming Thanksgiving, which she preferred over her pumpkin pie. The cake had pumpkin and salted caramel. That even sounded good to me, even though I don’t like pumpkin!
When it came to cooking, Veronica’s first time being off campus was during study abroad; this was the beginning of her cooking journey. She studied abroad in Denmark, though she said “Denmark is a not so exciting food place.” Her favorite meal she’s cooked has been a Thai inspired chicken meatball soup, which came out successfully, since cooking meat felt a bit tricky in terms of making sure it’s cooked all the way; people enjoying her food is very important to her.
After hearing about all this food, I was getting hungry. But I was also getting curious to see how Veronica saw her poetry being connected to her love for baking and cooking. “I think I use a lot of baking metaphors,” she said. “Right now I’m working on a poem that’s about baking Christmas cookies and my family’s history of that. My dad baked cookies and mailed them to all our extended family my whole childhood. And then part-way through highschool, he was just really busy– it was COVID at that point– and I had a lot more time, so I did it.” Now she’s been mailing out cookies for the past couple of years! “[It’s] fun adding my own spin on that and it’s kind of a metaphor for familial connection [and] the work it takes to keep in contact with people.”
After hearing that, I wanted to know more about the process of her baking and cooking and her poetry process, since I am not the most skilled in either. Veronica explained, “ I always like to find recipes; I’ll read like 400 comments– every comment– on the recipe and be like ‘Well they say this sixteen times and this like four times.’” She expressed that she wants her food to taste good but that she’s very meticulous about looking at the information out there when it comes to researching recipes in the hopes of cooking and baking something.
In an opposite sense, she thought it was a different process to write her poetry. “When I’m writing poetry, a lot of the time, I have an idea and I’ll just word vomit onto that page and then just write all the ideas I have down and later come back to it.” This question prompted her to say “That’s funny, I hadn’t thought of how opposite they are.”
For her, food, in general, is a metaphor. “Baking, especially, has very warm connotations, and so I like it in general as a way to talk about warm connections and close connections.” Some of the poems she told me about had similar themes of family ties and bonding, like this one anecdote:
“I know I have one poem about a story as a child where [my dad] would always use real vanilla and at some point I was with some close family friends, watching. I was like two or three, watching them bake. And apparently, I was like ‘Where’s the vanilla?” I was shocked that you could bake something from a box mix as a little kid. That’s another image from a different poem I have.”
Even though Veronica’s process for each is different, baking and cooking and poetry all challenge her in similar ways. “I’ll think about both of them a lot in my head before I write them down. With recipes, I’m reading all about them and with poems I’m going over an idea and then I’m thinking about it and I just have to do it all in one go,” she said. “I’ll plan out a baking recipe and then make a cake for four hours of the day or I’ll think of a poem idea and be like ‘Okay, I have to write everything about it and go back and connect the ideas that haven’t connected already. When I’m committed, I’m going to commit to it.”
After hearing her responses, I saw how vulnerable baking and cooking can be, similar to how poetry can be. The intricacies of care, attention and self-fulfillment by producing something that multiple people can enjoy, not just yourself, is resonant in Veronica’s descriptions of her multiple crafts. Veronica showed me many different cake concoctions that she’s made in the past. Check out this one, which she wanted everyone to see! We want to thank Veronica for taking the time to be interviewed by The Words and allowing us into her creative world of baking, cooking and poetry and how connected they are for her.