Baking Lessons

A day before the Christmas night i planned to bake my favorite choco lava cake and believe me my entire house was smelling chocolate. All ingredients were ready, and i took a step ahead by clicking every step during the cake preparation in order to blog it. And i have all the pics which if put together can easily give you an impression of a beautiful cake preparation experience.

But the truth is...my recipe failed...miserably. The chocolate inside was not running as it should have and i baked the entire thing into a lump which i cant even call a cake. * sob * The only good thing was that i had not baked the entire batter at once and still had more than half of it left. This is when mom came to my rescue. She said...at least make something edible like a chocolate sponge cake ...add baking soda (which they never mentioned in any of the tutorial videos...may be because it was too obvious :P :D ) And...tada...yummy and moist chocolate sponge cakes are ready.

I was happy and decided to give it a twist by adding molten chocolate with raisins and nuts between two cakes and on top as u can see...and of-course topping with strawberries and kiwi completed the cake.

So...you may wonder what baking lessons am I giving you from this normal story of failure and backup. Well...you see, i had all the ingredients, all the apparatus but still i failed. The one who rescued me was my mom. But that happened only because i did not hide anything from her. Your recipe of love and success in your life may be on the verge of a complete mess while you may not be aware but parents are such selfless beings ... they will never let you break down. Realize this and try loving them selflessly as well. From this Christmas lesson...I give myself this wonderful gift for new year and so can you. :D

Happy New Year folks. :D

Spontaneous Capture

Its not everyday that you get to see so closely and harmlessly a troop of monkeys having fun, jumping off from one branch to another and sometimes only squatting at a place as if in deep contemplation. I am blessed to live in a colony that is a house to quite a few but rich flora and fauna and more than that, luckily I have this mango tree very close to my window. So, for an observer there is always a lively action taking place outside, may that be chattering of the playful squirrels, the sweet notes of cuckoos or even the simple rattling of leaves.However, this day was different, I couldn't get my eyes off from this small family of monkeys who happened to sit quite close to my window which was closed and I was as usual peeping through the ventilator. We feel that humans are the only beings gifted with complex emotions; might be true to an extent but there is this universal language of love that knows no boundaries.I could only take a moment off to get my camera to capture this spontaneous moment of love of parents for their child.

Small Accomplishments: When you say, you learned it.

A new day starts, you pick up the newspaper and read the thought for the day... "Every morning is the first day of rest of your life." It says what is gone is gone, today is another chance to feel accomplished. And you are quick to appreciate it. What follows is a new status update, probably tagged #feeling motivated. You feel that you have learned something new today. But as the day passes, you find yourself often repeating these phrases...oh, i shouldn't have wasted my time yesterday... i could have done this if i had that... i should have not taken this course at all and probably end up feeling miserable thinking of what could have happened in the time that is past.

Did you just contradict what you learned or... wait, did you really learn it? You just read it and probably even thought about it. So what is it like to learn something? More often we learn the small lessons of life the hard way. Like realizing the value of something after losing it, alas... but there are better ways. We often do things in three steps... think, plan and execute. To just read something or to even appreciate it, is not to learn it. Learning needs some mindful action. It is when we practice something, that we can say that we have learned it. Here, it is important to understand that learning is not an immediate process, it takes time, it takes patience and sometimes even failures. Embrace yourself, give yourself a chance and do not expect to shoot the aim at one go. To learn is to first accept that you are not perfect. Suppose, you read that drinking 8 glasses of water everyday is good for health and you decide to drink 8 glasses of water everyday but end up drinking only 4. Well...bravo...give yourself a pat, and let the count increase to 8 with each passing day. You will not even realize and end up achieving it and believe me it is these small accomplishments that will make your day and prepare you for bigger things in life. So the next time you read something interesting and positive, go... take a step ahead and try to practice it because now you know you need to actually practice it when you say you learned it.