I enjoy baking.

I don’t do it a lot of the time, but when I do, it acts as a really good stress reliever, and I like to put hard work into it so that I can enjoy destroying it later.

In this case, I decided to make a carrot cake.  I had never made large scale cakes before, so this cake was the first time making something that would look like the photo on recipe books.  It was exciting, almost thrilling to be challenging myself to do this.

This is what it was supposed to look like:

Photo credit from cookbook: The Big Life

And this is what it turned out to be:

As you can probably see, there are stark differences between one and the other.  I think that what I got out of this was that I shouldn’t preheat my oven beforehand, as the oven was too hot when I put the batter in and that burned the outside before it cooked the inside.  I should have also greased my pan properly, with butter first, then coating it with flour on top.  Since I just greased with butter, the cake stuck to the pan and broke when it did get out of the pan, which made it difficult to do the layers in the middle, it had broken up too much.

Even if I did do the layers, I couldn’t, because it didn’t rise enough.  So instead of doing a full layered cake, there were no layers.  I love icing cakes so this was a big disappointment for me.

Apart from all my mistakes, I would say that it still turned out okay, as it was still edible in the end.  Baking is extremely technical, anything can go wrong with it, even if you make the smallest of mistakes.  Would I still try to achieve this in the future?  Yes.  Although it is hard at times, the biggest thing we learn from it is how to improve on your mistakes.  We make mistakes all the time, even forget the promises we make to not go back on our mistakes.  How we get better at life is by improving on our mistakes, to be the ideal person that we want to be.  I would go back and improve on this cake because I could have done so much better.