On Failure

Failure is one of those funny things -- everyone wants to avoid it and it will inevitably happen to everyone. Plus, everyone has their own definition thereof.

In my day job, I write software that does evaluations of various things (pass/fail) and the criteria for failure varies by what's being evaluated. It's not always "do this exactly or you fail", but often times there's an upper and lower limit around the exact match that also constitutes passing.

When I'm doing cake, I too often hold myself to the former definition of pass/fail -- if it's not exactly the way I envisioned it and the recipe does not turn out perfectly and all of my edges aren't 100% straight and I don't magically have beautiful handwriting in frosting even though my handwriting in real life is atrocious, then I've failed.

The facts of the matter are that short of lighting it on fire, completely missing the mark on what someone asked me to do, or dropping the cake before it can be served any time that you complete a cake and people are happy to eat it, you have achieved success.

Cake is a labor of love -- and just like the people we love, they're not going to turn out perfectly every time. There will be things that annoy us (too dry/cracking fondant, a not entirely level cake, a recipe that you haven't tried before that fails to come out right), but in the end as long as the recipient is happy, we need to let go of our inner critics and accept the praise that is rightfully ours.

I had a heck of a weekend working on my husband's cake. I was trying to scale up two cupcake recipes to full blown cake recipes and they did not come out as well as I'd liked. I even made two hockey puck cakes in the baking process due to not reading the recipe closely enough late at night and I ended up resorting to a box mix for part of the cake (which I often consider cheating, but sometimes you just want consistent performance).  I have a hate/hate relationship with my cake leveler and need to find a better one, so the angles on my cake are odd. And I can't write script on a straight line to save my life.  I was up until midnight Friday finishing the cake, it lost part of a bottom edge getting onto the board, and in general kept apologizing to my husband for not having the type of birthday cake I thought he deserved.

And I was wrong. It looked exactly like what it was supposed to, he was happy, and it was delicious eating.  I don't have to answer to Kerry Vincent on the quality of my fondant work, and I don't have to hold myself to that standard internally either.

In short -- lighten up and be willing to fail. Either way there's still cake at the end :)