A Piece of Cake

One of the top things that I want to learn in the kitchen is baking. The task seems simple enough. You just have to mix butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder, vanilla extract, and other ingredients together; and presto, you've got a delicious cake. Well, actually it's not that simple. It just looks simple when you watch professional pastry chefs get into it. But for a mere father like me, it's probably a tall order.
To be honest, I've never really had a chance to do any baking back in the Philippines. You see, one tool required for this task is an oven. And we didn't have that back. Here in Australia, the oven came with the house that we rented. So aside from roasting, which was another thing that we couldn't do back then , I decided that I will finally learn baking. I didn't care if I could easily buy a cake cheaper than buying the ingredients I would need to make my own. This doesn't even include the hard that I'll probably exert to make it.
Anyways, hopefully it would be a piece of cake once I had enough practice. I'll keep you posted.

The Lunch Box

I've been having trouble lately with making fresh ideas for my kids Lunch box. I often wonder how with all my ideas for dishes, I can't think of proper lunch box dishes. I bet, any Master Chef would think this is a tall order. I don't think it has something to do with the taste at all. I mean, I know that you can try to please kids with the usual sweets or savoury dishes. But I guess that is precisely the problem. The food has to be appealing to the kids. If the food doesn't have much flavor or the kids won't like it; it will definitely end up in the bin.
One other problem that I face everyday is how to make the food nutritious. I can't just serve them hot dogs everyday. I'd probably have malnourished kids if I did that. The food has to have nutritional value. For some parents, it has to be a well balance lunch. That's is another problem that I would have to overcome. One of my kids doesn't like to vegetables too often.
Anyways, the lunch box is still a constant challenge for me. I try very hard to keep it exciting for the kids. It's good thing so far that they seem to finish their lunches.