Admitting it is the first step

They say the tides are turning and men are now more at home in the kitchen than women, and for a while I thought this was true, until I realised that it wasn’t just men that were better in the kitchen than me, it was everybody.
And I mean everybody, my 9 year old niece Emily can make a perfect sponge cake entirely by herself, she weighs, she measures, she mixes, she pours and she levels, and whilst her cakes turn out to be a delicious treat, for some reason, mine turned out to be a disastrous mess!
Cooking and baking has always been something that has eluded me, I don’t know why but no matter what I did, it NEVER turned out right.

And I hear the cooks among you crying “practise makes perfect”, and I did practise, and practise and practise.
Every single day for 6 months I tried to cook or bake something, hoping and praying that today would be the day, the day I finally got something right.
But still, my cakes sank, my pies burnt around the edges and my coq au vin was well and truly cocked.

I was told time and time again to ask my mother, who, don’t get me wrong, is a great cook, but NOT a great teacher. I believe she is a medical marvel in that she was born without patience glands.

And also I was 25 years old; there was no way I was going to ask my mummy to teach me how to cook

So I decided to call in the pros, I enrolled myself in a cookery class at my local college, “these people are meant to teach, they will be able to help me” I told myself.
I was wrong, apparently I still don’t do well under the instruction of a teacher!
The teacher and the rest of the class were getting really fed up of me holding things up with my constant mistakes and after a while I was as welcome as a vegetarian on Top gear.
The pressure and the time limits (And the glares from the rest of the class) were really putting me off my stride and that’s why I produced such monumental failures, well that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I felt like the absolute only person in the world that couldn’t cook!

So after finishing (finishing and failing) the entire course I decided last week that there was only one person that could get me through this, me.

I have now officially taken it upon myself to learn how to cook, I know I won’t shout at myself, I can work to my own time frame and no one will know if I make an epic mess up of things!

I’ll use recipes from any books I can find and online, following the instructions exactly I will see how I fare.

I am going to start with something simple, a bog standard run of the mill Victoria sponge, I’ll let you know how it goes.