About five weeks ago I had my 20th birthday, and yesterday I received a belated gift from my friend Jitske (yes, we are both aware of the fact her name looks like “jetski” (and have joked about many a time) — it’s a Dutch name). She gave me the cutest little baking set, which you can see in the picture above. She’d come across it in a shop in Bruges and just had to buy it for me, she said.
I love this gift, because it’s so perfect for our friendship. Jitkse and I have been friends since primary school, and even though we went to different schools when we were 12 we’ve always remained close. In fact, we celebrated our 15-year anniversary with a trip to London this summer. She and I are very different people, but there’s (at least) one thing we share a great love for: baking.
I honestly cannot remember how it all started but somewhere over the years Jitske became my “baking buddy”. When we were still in secondary school we didn’t get together very often, but when we did, there was practically always some baking involved. We made a lot of cupcakes during those days, often with buttercream and cute pink sprinkles (or chocolate — we were teenage girls, after all).
However, not all of our baking attempts were succesful. Just yesterday we were reminiscing about the time we tried to make blue macarons and they came out a very sickly looking grayish brown with some blue patches. Oh, and they didn’t taste very good either. We haven’t tried to make macarons since then, but yesterday we decided that we’re going to try to make them again sometime soon, and they are going to be delicious!
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Jitske is more or less the person who introduced me to the magical world of baking, and for that I’m really grateful to her. We have so much fun when we bake together, but I’ve also learned that baking can be very therapeutic for me when I’m feeling stressed. Baking calms me down or cheers me up.
It’s a creative outlet for me and I always feel really happy and pleased when I take that first bite out of that still warm muffin — full of anticipation — and it tastes delicious. I love how a couple of seperate ingredients can make something so wonderful.
I might be sounding a bit melodramatic at this point but come on, admit it, baking is awesome.
Books Baking and Blogging 
I would love to learn to bake. I can stove top cook and oven roast things. But, baking for some reason I just can not seem to get!
I think the most important part about baking (at least when your starting out) is to follow the recipe very carefully. And to not be too ambitious at first and start with something easy. 🙂
Ha! That is my problem I am not so much one of those follow the recipe people but more let me just mix this all together and guess at the sizes! lol
Ah, well, that might explain it, lol! 🙂