As I sieved through old posts looking for inspiration for today’s post, I came across this one draft that I’ve never managed to finish. But the way, this post was originally started on February 3, 2013. As usual then, it was a spur of moment thing, feeling of anger and annoyance.

This post originally was called “The Recipe Modifier”, something about my mom not following instructions. I tend to feel annoyed and angry when people don’t follow instructions. But I’m not going to tell that story. Instead, as implied in the title, I’m going to tell about baking.

Ever since we came to the U.S. and discovered a wonderful invention called an oven, we’ve and by we, I mean my mom, been using it to learn to bake cakes, cookies, and other wonderful things that we cannot make on a stove. However, most of the time is just plain failure. Too done, too dry, too hard, well, you get my point.

The main problem, I first gathered, was my mom’s lack of baking skills but I soon learned that it’s all about the measuring and following instructions. If you measure everything accurately and precisely, it shouldn’t go wrong. After all, my muffin recipe came out perfect every time I made it and disaster whenever she made it because she just guesstimates everything!

For example,

She never uses a knife to level-off the flour. Like this:

It only takes a second but as usual, she wants to rush through everything like it’s a race.

When I took my Home Economics class in my freshman year of high school, the first thing I learned was cooking and baking takes patience. You need to measure everything accurately and precisely in order for the final result to come out right.

Sometimes, life cannot be rushed.