Cake baking day!

So today i tried to bake another cake and yet again i failed... Woaaah, how difficult could it be to bake a decent cake?? It turned out way better than the first attempt, when i tried to bake an apple cake, but still it's not what i wanted. I probably should already just follow the steps of some recipe, but i wanted to do it all by myself, without any recipes and any hints. Well, lesson learned - i'm gonna learn first how to, and just then experiment on my own.

Todays cake was a mint-honey plain cake and i guess it looks way better than it actually tastes. At first, i wanted to make another apple pie, since i failed big time last time, so i wanted to improve, but as my mint is withering (yeah, we have terrible heat here in Leipzig atm...) i've decided to use chop it and use it for the batter, which was, i guess, a good idea. I whipped butter and sugar at first, then i added room-temperature egg. I first

mixed flour with the baking powder and just then added butter/egg/sugar thing and finally, poured milk on top. I also added some honey, but then i forgot it and added some more sugar which was wrong turn for the cake turned out somehow to sweet. Surprise, surprise, huh?

I cannot say, that it was a bad cake, but it sure wasn't the cake i wanted and imagined. First of all, as mentioned before, it was really too sweet, but that's just a mistake and i know why it turned out like that. But what i disliked at most was the structure of the dough again!!! It wasn't fluffy at all... Well, i didn't have to put efforts in chewing it like the apple pie, but still it wasn't what i was waiting for. And i don't know what i did wrong. But i understood couple of things.

1. Lack of patience. This is something i really have to learn when baking. Cooking isn't as bad, because i think i enjoy cooking more than making sweets, but making sweets is so much fun! I want to be good at it... Anyway, i noticed that already when i was preparing my "Love Cake" for my special one and me... I couldn't even wait until it cools down and put the icing on a warm cake, so it kinda melted a little bit. So today i did my best in waiting until the cake cools down, because i wanted honey to stay on top of the cake, but then i used up all my potential and couldn't wait any longer until the melted honey gets a bit more firm, so basically i messed up anyway in the end. Well it's just a cake, but if i had to make pralines or something more precise, i think i would fuck up big time just because of my lack of patience and that's something i'm gonna work on from now on.
2. Not wanting to admit that i CANNOT. Well, this is basically what this is all about. When i follow the recipes everything goes just fine, but i wanted to achieve it by myself, although i don't have the knowledge for it. So hop hop hooray - time for learning. I wanna know how to bake an ultimate cake without any recipe! It doesn't have to be a fancy cake, it can be a simple pound cake or something, but i want to be able to bake something sweet and good without recipe. Well, i have to admit one thing though - cheesecake that i made couple of months back (no photo though, sorry...) was pretty good and i wasn't using any recipe. But this cannot be a praise since i do have to learn the basics first, before stepping into a whole new level. I might be ok in cooking area (not meat though, since i don't eat it), but baking is something totally different.
3. Wanting to be perfect. Which is nearly impossible in our lives... There's nothing perfect, so maybe sometimes i could close my eyes and just enjoy what i have instead of looking what i could have. And, yes, practice makes perfect, so i just have to learn and try, try, try and never give up. And one day i'm gonna eat home-made cake that tastes so good i never wanna go buy cake in the shop. But today's cake definitely doesn't fall into that category - i even have a small belly ache, coz it was too sweet.

You know it's not all about cooking in today's post, even though you might think like that... The way a single human-being does something is what one is. I'm inpatient not just when i'm baking a cake and i do always want to be perfect which gives me headaches so often! And i want to know better without covering the basics and when i make mistakes, sometimes i just don't wanna admit it. Probably i should stick to things i know and explore the unknown areas little by little. We cannot redo our lives, so "practice makes perfect" doesn't count here, but if we took a closer look to our every day life and if we tried to polish our sharp edges, we could make it easier not just for the people around us, but also for ourselves, which is actually the main point!

As time for preparations for my exam passes by, i don't worry too much anymore. I did learn today and i did understand why i'm so sleepy. It was just like my special one said. I overdid with learning and now every time i opened a book, i immediately got sleepy. Probably it was my body sending my signals to stop and i tried ignoring them, but now i've decided my body knows the best. Although i learned today, i stopped when i did what was on my plan and that's enough for today. Tomorrow, on my last day before exam, i'm gonna take my camera and go to the zoo if the weather is good. I'm sure i'm gonna have lots of fun there! After all, enough is enough. I learned everything i had to and if that's not gonna be good enough, then i'm gonna try again, but for now i should stop learning and also - stop worrying, because there is nothing i can do now and there's no way i could influence the exam, so it's better for myself to calm down and enjoy some nice summer weather on the balcony...