After a long day at work, Carole would often curl up with a book or some knitting as a way to relax. Recently though, she had traded these activities in favour of baking, which proved to be more therapeutic than she could have ever imagined.
Finn adored his mother's baking and had taken to requesting that she bake his favourite M&M cookies more often; a request that Carole happily obliged when the drama in the New Directions became too much for Finn to bear. Whenever Finn was feeling upset because of relationship problems with Rachel or after encounters with Karofsky that left him feeling as though he wasn't a good enough brother to Kurt, Carole would sit him down at the table, prepare him a glass of warm milk with peppermint, give him a couple of cookies, and talk to him about his problems because, like any mother, she would do anything for her son to be happy.
One night, while Carole was lying in bed and flipping through her recipe book, Burt commented on how Kurt used to bake all the time, which Burt suspected was Kurt's way of remembering his mother. This resonated with Carole, who immediately recruited Kurt to be her baking assistant in a further attempt to bond with the boy that she had grown to love as her own son. She knew that he was lonely and, although she could never replace his mother, she hoped that she could provide him with the maternal love and comfort that he desperately craved.
After a long conversation with Kurt, on the subject of one Blaine Anderson who was quickly becoming a permanent fixture around the Hudson-Hummel home, Carole decided that she would have to start baking at least once a week. While she maintained that it was due to the combined appetites of Blaine and Finn, Carole had a much more important reason for doing so - Blaine was rarely in contact with his mother so she had taken it upon herself to send Blaine back to Dalton with packages of homemade sweets at the beginning of each week. She thought of him as one of her boys, to love and to care for.
During these occasions, Carole remembered how she used to bake with her mother when she was young, and how her mother had always reminded her that the most important ingredient in a recipe was love. Having experienced firsthand the way that love helped heal and comfort, Carole was inclined to agree.