My First Chocolate Sponge Cake: How Baking Found Me

 

Today I want to take you back to the very first time I made a chocolate sponge cake—and even decorated it. I’ve shared before how my love for food began, and I’ve even talked about the first Oreo cake I ever baked. But my very first chocolate cake goes all the way back to school, when I was in class 8.

We had SUPW periods where our teacher encouraged us to try different activities. One day, she announced we were going to bake a cake. I was beyond excited. I carefully collected all the ingredients—even a few things for decoration. In class, she patiently guided us: how much of each ingredient to add, how to grease the cake tins, and finally, how to set the oven temperature.

One by one, we went into the school kitchen to prepare our cakes. The excitement of seeing my batter transform into a fluffy sponge was something I had never felt before. That cake may not have been perfect, but to me, it was pure magic.

Inspired, I tried baking at home with my mother’s help. To be honest, I failed many times. The cakes would sink, the texture wouldn’t be right, and eventually I felt like giving up. But little did I know that what felt like the end of a small hobby would actually become the beginning of a lifelong love.

Today, if someone asks me what I do to keep myself calm, my answer is always baking. There is nothing more soothing than whisking, mixing, and decorating—sometimes with music or an audiobook playing in the background. Whenever I’m tense, my first instinct is to bake something. I don’t consider myself perfect, but I do chase perfection when it comes to food. Baking is the one place where failure never stops me—I just keep trying until it works.

And yet, no matter how many cakes I bake—even if it’s a thousand—I’ll always remember the taste of the chocolate cake my mother used to make when I was a child. It was my first memory of cake, and it’s still the most comforting.

That first chocolate sponge cake in school may have been a simple beginning, but it was the spark. It taught me that sometimes we don’t go searching for our passions—sometimes, they find us, often in the most unexpected places.