INSPIRATION

It doesn’t matter, just try again next time!

 

I am a dessert lover and I love going to cafes. The same is true when I travel abroad, setting out to find that favorite café would help to make the trip a memorable one. From enjoying a meal to browsing the Internet for recipes, taking notes, seeking guidance from teachers, eventually, I started making my own dessert! It probably has to do with my major in food technology, which gradually nurtured my interest in baking.

Let us talk about cakes! Some people may think that it is time-consuming to accurately weigh each ingredient to bake a cake, but for a food science grad, it is akin to doing an experiment. We weigh the ingredients, stir them, and mix them into batter before pouring it into the baking mould.

Through the glass of the oven, I enjoy watching the thick batter slowly expand and rise in volume. I waited by counting down every minute and second until the "ding" sound goes off. With great anticipation, I carefully took out the cake and leave it to cool down, then I would slowly unmould it from the cake pan. Upon seeing that the colour is just right and if cake did not retract nor collapse, it will put a smile on my face.

Yay! After all, it took me quite a lot of effort to experiment on it. If the cake did not turn out to be as expected, I would recall the process to find out what went wrong and note it down so that I could do it better next time.  

And it’s so natural for me to just grab a piece of the cake and start tasting it. If we didn’t make the food ourselves, how would we be able to appreciate the wisdom behind each serving of food? Occasionally, I do encounter some "episodes" during the cooking or baking process, but I do not view them as failure, instead, they give me a better understanding on how to improve on the food preparation next time. And so, I always cheer myself by saying, “It doesn’t matter, just try again next time!”