I failed to make a cheesecake. 

Today I failed to make a cheesecake. The plan was simple: Make cheesecake, eat too much cheesecake. Somehow I failed to get past step 1. I’d decided to make a Salted Caramel cheesecake over the bank holiday weekend but didn’t get a chance to hit up the Tesco near my house for the ingredients. Marc bangs on about setting S.M.A.R.T goals a lot at SCA and to be honest, goal setting is a really useful tool to keep motivated, even more so during lockdown. Unfortunately, I had made it a goal of this week to make a cheesecake, thinking I would get it out of the way on Monday and start the week off on a strong foot. Alas, that didn’t happen so I had to settle for some mid-week cheesecake action. “Could be worse,” I thought. Naïvely. 

The thing is, in the past I’ve made quite a few banging cheesecakes. Usually fruit flavoured (shout out to my diabetic parents) and delicious, in all my 25 years on this planet, of which I’ve been cooking for about 9 of them, I’ve never failed to make a cheesecake.  The best was a mango cheesecake I made last summer. Mike likes to say we’re only as good as our latest piece of work and let me tell you, last year’s mango cheesecake would have made Paul Hollywood forgo a handshake and kiss me on the mouth if he’d tasted it. I was so proud of it. I even gave some to my girlfriend, with a little extra for her family, because I thought her parents might even get over the whole Sikh-Muslim thing if they tasted it. It was that good. 

This time around though. Dear god, what a disgusting mess I made. Even more upsetting was the fact that I had made the salted caramel sauce from scratch and it came out perfectly! Oh but then only to waste it, adding it on top of the gloop that I was faced with at the end of my cooking escapades. What a shame. (I actually messed up making the sauce the first time around. If only I’d stopped there…) 

I am a firm believer that every experience comes with an opportunity to learn something. So, after 393 words and a few hours of processing my emotions, what have I learned from this experience?

My first thought was that I was reminded that you can fail at something you’ve done a bunch before, no matter how perfectly it went last time. I guess in regards to SCA, that’s a lesson I’ve learned and forgotten a lot. Some weeks go amazingly and some you feel like banging your head against the wall. It definitely helps take the pressure I put on myself off, until I forget this key information of course. 

The second thing I learned was that the reason I messed this cheesecake up was probably because I whisked it too much. What a completely easy to interpret metaphor for my work at SCA. At some point, I have to stop meticulously looking at the details on the page and working it too much and stay focused on the bigger task. 

Or it could also mean I should stop polishing turds but I refuse to accept that this cheesecake was doomed to begin with. 

In the end, I blitzed it all up and it made a banging ice cream, so I guess it all worked out.

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Song of the SCAB:  Kanye West – So Appalled https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o9HzQ3zAcE