Bake from what you know....

I was 16 when I first fell in love. I was young, inexperienced, and completely naive. I also had the misconception that if I threw everything in at the beginning, everything would turn out alright.

Boy... was I wrong or what?

With every failure, however, came a lesson. Every time something went wrong, I'd pick myself right back up and try again because how else do we become good at things? I learned from my own mistakes and bettered myself for the next time, and eventually, I became pretty good at baking.

What? Did you honestly think I would dedicate a whole entire blog to my first time falling for a guy? Please. I wouldn't waste my time.

I first fell in love with baking when I was 16, and my love for it has only increased as the years pass by. It started off slow. My mother used to bake Dominican cakes for a living back when I was younger. I had never tried baking on my own but I would always watch my mother spend hours perfecting a cake that would just be crumbs the next day and I'd wonder why she would even waste her time. It baffled me because she seemed content as she baked. She sang songs, and not once did I hear her complain about the mess, or the amount of eggs being used or how long it takes to bake whatever it was she was baking. She was happy and it wasn't until I cracked open my first box of Duncan Hines Yellow Cake that I knew why baking held such magic over people.

It's hard to explain, but for me, it's an escape. Yes, I may be in between jobs at the moment and I may have a lot of free time on my hands, but life deals you crumby hands sometimes, and you have no choice but to go with it no matter how stressful it may be. Sometimes, an escape is needed. That's what baking is to me. I know that if I look at a list of ingredients and I follow the recipe word for word, in the end, I'm getting exactly what I put in the work for. I know that if I set out to make chocolate chip cookies, by the time I follow the last instruction, I'll have a batch of chocolate chip cookies. There are no complications. No mysteries. No worries. All I have to do is follow a set of instructions and I get exactly what I want. I can even alter it a bit to my liking and I'll still get what I want.

Wouldn't life be a lot better if things were always like this? ... at least to some extent.

But life isn't as easy as that and so it's up to us to make the most of it in whatever way we can which is why I bake. It is a passion of mine that I hope to pursue someday and share with the rest of the world because it really does bring a smile to a bakers face when their creations are enjoyed. Eating makes people happy. I can bake. My goods + people willing to eat them= Happiness. That's what it's all for in the end, isn't it?