‘This is too much. I can’t handle the stress. How will I survive? How will I finish writing this in time?’ We all feel like this at some point and, in Cambridge, that point seems to come around much sooner than expected, like the bedder who knocks on your door too early in the morning. Everyone has their tried and tested methods for dealing with pressure, whether it’s gaming for twenty-four hours straight, watching crappy TV shows, or jogging in the middle of the night. If you have yet to figure out a method of de-stressing, then worry not (or at least panic less), because I have the solution: procrastibaking.

When I stress out, I bake. It all started when, in a fit of anger and frustration, I looked at my lengthy to-do list and decided the most important item on that list was baking a cake for my friend’s birthday party. Discarding my supervision work, I spent the next three hours throwing all of my emotions into a bowl and mixing them with a considerable amount of sugar and fat. The result? Well, my friend received a lasagne-shaped chocolate cake in a Tupperware box, but I felt much better. Since then, in moments of extreme stress, I bake. I even have a go-to procrastibaking recipe–my godmother’s coffee cake. When this cake appears on the table, my housemates know I’ve had a rough day.

The reason why procrastibaking works so well is because it incorporates many different de-stressing techniques in one:

Distraction: The staple of any relaxation activity. You can’t work on your essay while you bake. You have to concentrate on the recipe, on mixing the ingredients, on whether you’ve added the right amount of eggs. This gives your brain a much-needed rest.

Procrastinating: Most of the world’s greatest inventions were dreamt up during moments of procrastination. Was Isaac Newton not napping under an apple tree? You might come up with the answer to that supervision question (or even the meaning of life) while baking a delicious microwave chocolate cake.

Socialising: Being around your peers who are equally stressed and keep asking whether you’ve finished your essay is far from helpful–especially if you haven’t started. Being around your peers while they happily munch on the result of your procrastibaking and tell you what an amazing friend you are is much more relaxing.

Exercise: Okay, this might seem like a stretch, but beating and whisking takes some muscle power! Even if you have an electric beater, holding that up can feel like lifting weights at the gym. Rowers and other such sporty types (those that probably jog to de-stress) might not believe me, but you just need to watch Paul Hollywood knead bread. That man has muscles!

Comfort eating: You get to eat your procrasticake! Some might want to skip straight to this section of relaxing. Why not just buy a cake? And for the first year of my undergrad at Cambridge that is precisely what I did, gorging on icing-heavy chocolate cupcakes from EAT. But now I know better–put in a bit of extra effort and you could, not only bake your emotions into a glorious pudding, but reap all the extra benefits of procrastibaking!