Baking is fun. The rewards are delicious, and you can learn a lot just by following some very simple recipes. It’s good to always keep learning, and I think the best way to do that is to try new things.

It can be as simple as a new recipe, or a new book, but doing things new or differently every once in a while is quite important at keeping your brain active, and getting your creative juices flowing.

Yesterday I made my first lemon sponge cake and today I’m making what I think is my first pie, at least from scratch. This is because we had leftover lemons and apples respectively (I put lemon juice in the apple pie though).

These are the sort of things that you do once and then just think, why don’t we do this more often? Of course we have to dedicate time and effort, but there’s so much to gain from doing so.

Another reason for the baking though is that a lot of these things just don’t exist in Japan. If you want these things, you have to make them yourself, so it’s good to know how to do it.

One thing that kind of bothers me here is that your typical birthday and even Christmas cake is just a sponge cake with cream and strawberries. Sure it tastes good, but they’re expensive and I feel it wouldn’t be too hard to reproduce the cakes. It would be cool to know how to make these cakes easily. I guess for my birthday I miss just the normal chocolate cake we used to get. Now I have something else I need to learn.