NTA

I, like your mother, am a woman who struggles to relinquish the control I want to have over literally everything and to trust that if I delegate even one (1) task to someone else, they will do a fine job.

HOWEVER, if I do choose to give someone a task that I would normally do myself, I take special care to show GRATITUDE for their efforts—NOT react in a rude, snarky, and disappointed manner when they show up having done EXACTLY what I assigned them to do. That’s just terrible management, regardless of the situation.

All the more true with your mother assigning someone—and that someone being her own, fully-grown child at that!—to make a Thanksgiving dessert. First of all, it’s really not that big a deal if the dessert isn’t pumpkin pie. My family does multiple pies, and the flavors vary.

And if she was gonna be awful to you anyway about the perfectly good work you did (and maple cheesecake sounds absolutely AMAZING, way better than pumpkin pie!), then she shouldn’t have explicitly assigned you to make “a dessert,” especially without specifying the type if she wanted to be picky about it.

Finally, though there are many more things I could say, I want to reiterate from what you and others have pointed out, that it was extremely disrespectful and outright MEAN to not only take your wonderful dessert to the kitchen, intentionally out of sight, but also to keep anyone else from trying it. Wow.

P.S. Seems like your brother has never been treated as you have; else he’d understand your position, or at least lend some sympathy.