I've discovered baking!

I love cooking. But I've never been a fan of baking or making any form of dessert. Sure I was a fan of the products of baking, but not of the act itself. My previous encounters with it were at Home Econs class and a few other attempts as a secondary school student. It always seemed so fiddly. So precise. You must have 125g of flour, or 30 g of sugar, or 1 tsp of baking powder or whatever precise amount of whatever ingredient. And you couldn't just mix them all up as you wished. You must cream it together (whatever creaming it means) if it says to cream, or fold it in, or rub it. Otherwise all sorts of disasters would befall your creation.  And therefore you had to PAY ATTENTION. And to prove the point, I did have quite a few disasters (Val - remember the failed gingerbread? More like ginger melted thingy that hardened.)  Being a control freak, it was all too stressful for me.

Then one day, just before baby no. 2 was born, I was suddenly inspired to bake some scones or muffins for baby no. 1 to bring to school.  It just seemed rather shameful that he never had anything else but cheerios and goldfish and the occasional cracker in his lunchbox. I didn't know what his classmates had, but I imagined they had heavenly homemade delights. Actually, I was also feeling rather guilty that I didn't prepare a nice birthday celebration for him at school (ALL the other kids brought cake for their birthdays, but not mine...). So I thought I'd bake him something nice to show the teachers that I really wasn't such a bad mum. It was probably also a case of pre-delivery nesting instincts coming to the fore, because 12 hours after I bought all the ingredients for my first batch of muffins, I had delivered baby no. 2.

Anyway, while I didn't get to bake that time around, the interest had been piqued.  Long hours spent nursing baby no. 2 also afforded me the opportunity to be instructed by experts such as Martha Stewart and Nigella Lawson on TV.  Unlike my Home Econs classes (no offence to my Home Econs teachers, they were lovely, I was just a bad student), Martha and Nigella made it look so easy! They could even carry out a conversation, or flirt with the camera while at it (even if I find Nigella Lawson's habit of doing this rather annoying at times) AND the results weren't disastrous!   In fact, even if things went wrong, it was OK.  As Nigella Lawson notes on at least two occasions in her book "How to be a Domestic Goddess", that things go wrong in cooking even for her, but that it's not the end of the world.  

And so this has been my discovery. While my first few attempts (actually all my attempts), haven't been perfect, they've been pretty alright. In fact, some were quite nice. The best part of it is that Baby no. 1 gets to take part in the process. And I love that he enjoys the fruit of our labour (except when it contains raisins). 

So I've decided to name this blog in honour of Nigella Lawson's How to be a Domestic Goddess.  Which fits in perfectly with my larger ambition but more of that some other time.