Baking

Since becoming a mom there are many things that I used to think were a waste of time (like looking for sales at the grocery store, making my husband's lunch and making anything from scratch) that I have now started to do and even want to become good at. One of these things is baking. Before Claire was born I had very little use for baking. I figured that was what the bakery section of the grocery store was for. I did try baking a few times but nothing ever turned out. This is mostly because I am very, very bad at following recipes. I always start with the best of intentions but somewhere along the way I get a bit lazy and end up "improvising" a bit (this may work for more skilled bakers but for me always ends up in disaster) or getting bored of reading the recipe carefully so I just skim and end up missing some important steps. So I gave up baking altogether and put it into the "waste of time" category of my life. 
After having Claire I started to picture her coming home from school and telling me all about her day over some warm cookies and a glass of milk or having freshly baked muffins for her and her friends when they come over and then hearing them say things like, "Your mom is the best! We should come over here all the time!" I realized that in order to make these dreams a reality I had to learn to bake, so I turned to the miracle of video recipes. 
Video recipes are awesome! First of all they don't leave any room for improvising because they show you step by step what to do and they aren't boring at all (some of them are even funny)! Now that I use video recipes I have nothing but success and am so excited about my new found talent that I was telling my husband that I could probably make money at it by selling my baking. He just laughed. I guess he thinks I need a little more than a couple months experience before I go pro.