some 15 years ago, mami and i marvelled at watching heny sison bake on tv.  she did it all in a breeze - mixing, folding, decorating, ikaw na ang magaling! :)) i just wanted to watch her then.  i never thought that i would try baking!
last year, april convinced kuya that we need an oven and an electric mixer.  april and i have had an on and off relationship with baking.  sometimes tsamba, sometimes it's just a plain disaster.  there was a meringue that looked like slime, there was a sponge cake that had lumps of uncooked flour even after baking, there was mamon that tasted like egg whites.  so weird! :)) 
i learned that baked goodies are so bad for you - with all that eggs, flour, butter, sugar.  sugar is crazy!  sugar is bad, all those ingredients are bad.  it would be good if there were healthier substitutes/options simply because i feel good doing it :)
i learned that it's very difficult to substitute ingredients because using the wrong ones will affect the outcome big time, and that's in a bad way.  unlike with cooking, you could always use any handy ingredient in your cupboard in the absence of hard-to-find (read: expensive) ingredients.
i learned that it's hard to estimate when you are a newbie.  when it calls for 1 cup, it can't be 1.20!  and when it calls for sifting, it means YOU HAVE TO SIFT.  hindi pwede ang pwede na! :)) hindi pwede ang tamad!
and i still stand by my belief that as long as you can read, you can cook, and you can even bake!  it's fun!  here are some of my attempts:

upper left: banana chocolate cupcakes, recipe taken from home cooking rocks.  please excuse the holes on the cupcakes.  i used, ehem, chopsticks instead of toothpicks.  we don't keep toothpicks in the house :p
upper right: revel bars (but in cupcake form), recipe taken from somewhere in the internet (can't remember where).  it was a wish from mike.  he said his, ehem, ex made the best revel bars during HS.  revel bars are made of oatmeal-soft-batch-cookie-like stuff.  there's a chocolate coating on the top.  i like that it's like an energy bar (with all that sugar, who won't be energized?)
lower right: basic vanilla cupcakes, recipe taken from "bake, sell, give" magazine.  it tastes a bit like mamon :) kulang na lang ay frosting, which leads me to...
lower left: an imbento recipe for icing that looked like neon pink paint.  so annoying! :))  it was sent staight to the bin.  sayang!
looking forward to more sweetness in life.  ang sweeeeeet namaaaaan!