Birthday Cakes! It started with my son’s birthday

“To succeed you must commit yourself completely to the task”. I believe this saying is true and I say it from my experience. Because to commit oneself completely to something, there has to be a strong and compelling reason behind it. That reason for me came in the form of my son Madhav’s first birthday. He was turning a year old on 6th February. I wanted to make that occasion special for him.

We invited few friends and neighbors to the birthday celebration. Though I wanted to make that occasion special, I had no idea about the “how to” part. Birthday cakes were of course traditional and I had baked few cakes earlier. We also had a simple OTG at home which was about 15 years old at the time. Luckily the OTG was in working condition!

So without over thinking, my sister and I decided to go with a birthday cake as the main element. This was acceptable to the rest of the family as well. Armed with the confidence of having baked few cakes before, I marched on to Google ideas for the rest of the program. Balloons, props, party caps and such things.

Well, “I was in for a shock” would be a misnomer. I have seen elaborate birthday party preparations earlier. But it was only when I was seriously looking for doing something similar that I realized crux of the issue. The cake which was 100% the center piece of attraction of the event suddenly became just 25-30% of the whole show. Exotic cookies, cup cakes with all sorts of shapes on it – mermaids, looney toons, minions..you name it, it was there and exquisitely decorated stages. All of these did a marching parade through the Google pages in front of me..

That Google search, it did not terrify me, but it shook me wildly. The pages were yelling at me saying “hey wake up and see the reality.”

Well I saw the reality. AND I took the resolve that I’m going to make this first birthday really memorable for my son. I made a cake shaped as Lightning McQueen, his favourite character at that time. I also baked cookies, cake pops and many more items, some of which I was trying for the first time. Even working with fondant/ sugar paste was also the first time with that cake.

On his birthday, the cake as well as all the other items was a thunderous hit with the guests. It was unbelievable to many that I was not an experienced baker. It was hard for many to believe that I could make a perfect birthday cake within few attempts. They even suggested that I should explore baking as a business opportunity! I thanked all for their kind words, but baking as a business was something that I never ever thought of.

It must be true what the wise people say – you can only connect all the dots only backwards. You never get to do them forward. I learned many lessons that day when I did the first DIY on cake baking and party planning. The most important one was “commit yourself completely to the task”. And let me add the remaining piece “and success will come to you uninvited”. Because when you are committing yourself completely to a task, you are doing it because it is dear to you, you love it, you want your love to win, to succeed. In my case it was the love for making my son’s birthday memorable that made me commit myself completely to task.

You too can do this. It only requires you to pay attention to your heart, because it’s the heart that knows, the brain is there only to execute what the heart desires.

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