It all started with COVID-19 #stayathome. What’s better to do than satisfying your food cravings and a hungry tummy?
Like everyone else who is stuck at home, the world is now crazy about cooking, baking, making stuff at home, and so am I.
So a few weeks ago, I baked my first ever (mini) apple pie!
It was perfect — the crust was crunchy and the apple slices tasted so good coated with some caramelized sauce with a hint of cinnamon flavor! My aunt (whom I’m living with) said it was called The Beginner’s Luck.
It was so seriously darn good, easily beating all the apple pies you can find in stores outside (PS: There aren’t many good apple pies around in the town I live in).
But the apple pie was small — perfect for 2, but maybe not 3. The three of us wanted to have more, but the entire pie was gone after a serving.
So the next week, I baked another one. This time bigger one by 3 to 4 times.
Fast forward a few hours later, I pulled the XL Apple Pie out from the oven with full excitement and anticipation, I’m ready to have a feast!
Looking good!
After it was let to chill for hours, I sliced right into the pie and…
My heart sank. What was supposed to be a wonderful tea-time dessert turned out to be a massive disappointment.
It was awful! The apple slices weren’t tender. It’s like eating raw apples slices stacked up together for no good reason. The pie was swimming in a pool of apple juice, making it all mushy and gross.
I felt sad, with all the anticipation and excitement built up in me over the preparation process. Even sadder when I saw my aunt’s and uncle’s excitement followed with disappointment too.
I stopped baking for a while after that, with some residue of disappointment remaining in me, left undigested.
So what exactly went wrong? I reflected about it a few days later, and discovered something more than just mushy apple pie…
1. What used to work well doesn’t necessarily work in a larger scale or different context.
Yeah, it might sound pretty obvious. But as a beginner in baking and cooking, I used to think everything is flexible — want a bigger pie? Easy! Just multiply the recipe by 4 times, and you’ll get a bigger one!
This is what exactly went wrong in baking my second apple pie. I simply multiplied the original recipe (meant for 2 servings) ingredients by 4, and did everything else in the same way — and disaster happened!
Scaling up doesn’t simply mean double your input and expect a doubled output.
Unless you’re a factory or a machine.
There’s no secret formula that’s applicable to all contexts, but you can eventually invent a formula of yours through multiple trials and errors.
2. There’s no such thing as The Beginner’s Luck.
At least in baking, and in life generally.
On my very first attempt to bake the small apple pie, I was clueless on how to do this well, so I followed the recipe exactly 100%.
And a heavenly-made apple pie popped out of the oven!
On the second round, I already felt good and slightly more confident in my ability to bake a good pie, and so I made changes to the recipe and did it in my own way. That’s how things screw up.
So the Merriam-Webster’s definition of The Beginner’s Luck should be:
A beginner who is feeling clueless on how to do certain things well, so he/she did exactly as taught. And Goal! A major success!
Sometimes emptying your cup is a good call. You just have to trust your ‘guide’, muster the courage and just do it!
Who knows, luck might repeatedly hit upon you, when you always treat things in life like a beginner. As a beginner, you have certain traits that are playing out well for you — a fresh perspective, an overwhelming enthusiasm, an optimism that things will always work out, a lack of fear of failure, and a lack of ego to babysit. And that’s what mostly brings luck around.
3. Failure is part of the process
Sounds really cliche, I know.
This is a painful mistake that I’d never repeat again — 5 hours of work on my precious Sunday and 8 apples sacrificed in total. Plus all the disappointment!
But if I were to read these mistakes or learn from somewhere else just like you’re reading mine right now, chances are I’d not be able to recall it before I bake again next time. The bittersweet pain just simply wasn’t there to haunt me every time I baked, helping me to embody this lesson learned.
A simple sharing of my failure over here, writing it out rather than burying it down under the grave of emotions helped me to get over it, and gave the ‘failure’ story a new twist! I personally liked how it turned out! From Apple Pies to Life.
The next time when you fail in something, fill in the blanks yourself and start writing about it.
“Life’s more than just______”
Mine’s “Apple Pies” this time round. But I guess we could use it with “assignments, jobs, money” too.
It made the entire experience so much more worth it. And interesting!
4. Common sense is not at all common and similar among all people
To all the master chefs and pro-bakers who are reading this post of mine, you might be saying “use common sense, isn’t it obvious that you’d have to cook your apples before baking such a big pie?!”
But guess what, this thought has not come across my mind at all when I was preparing to bake the pie. I thought it made perfect sense to scale up the ingredients this way, and follow what the rest of the recipe calls for.
Because, common sense is not at all common to someone who’s new to something. So do not expect a newbie to take the same course of action as you under the same circumstances.
I always found myself guilty of this, repeatedly wondering “isn’t this common sense?”, when I see people doing something weird or illogical (in reference to my common sense at least).
Truth is, my common sense doesn’t apply to others, so is other’s on me.
Takeaway is — remember to always be empathetic.
Because really, how forgetful could we be when we’re too carried away in our emotions when things happen? Guess it’s time to resolve all the frustrations and annoyance that was once brought up by our common sense.
So moral of the story is — Bake More!
and thou shalt be wise…
Writing this piece perfectly wrapped up my failed baking experience, and it made those 8 apples well sacrificed!
Because life’s more than just baking good apple pies! 😉
Sometimes reflecting is the best gift to yourself — for healing, for learning and for growing. And picking up new hobbies makes you see things in new perspectives.
Take the time you need to step away from a failure, then return later to see things in a different perspective, giving your story a new light!
