Baking relaxes me.

At least it used to.

Well, let’s be more specific…. I have control issues and baking lets me have control over the baked goods. I control what goes in it and I control what it will look like.  I am known for throwing imperfect things away.  I can’t help it, but if I know something is missing 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon it’s just complete garbage.  (I’m getting better with that…)

A friend laughed and told me once, “God doesn’t throw imperfection away.”

Thank God.

Last week I wrote how Life is nothing like blueberry cake…

It’s more like this post about making sunflowers out of icing.  It doesn’t always go according to plan and it has ups and downs and times of wanting to give up and times of joy and wanting to throw cake against the wall.

Patience isn’t my strong suit (especially right now) and I have mad respect for cookie decorators. I just don’t see the point in being so tedious over something that will be eaten in .0004 seconds. My heart can’t handle that.

With that said I have been wanting to practice decorating with icing.  You can only get better at something the more you do it, right?

This last week I watched a tutorial on how to make sunflowers and couldn’t wait to try it.

Sunflowers are so happy.  When I see them at the store I always want to buy some.

“A year from now you will have wish you started today…”

Today is the day.

I turned on some worship music and prepared my icing.  I baked my cupcakes last night to save time.  These sunflowers would be made out of a lemon cake and simple vanilla icing.

Time to get started.

I couldn’t find the icing tip.

I thought I threw it away.

Today is trash day.

I was thiiiiiis close to flipping over the outside garbage can when for some reason I looked in my baking box. Apparently, for the first time in my life I put something where it belonged the first time. I didn’t remember putting that there yesterday, but there is an example of God’s grace. Yes, something as simple as finding an icing tip is grace!!

Ok. I filled my bag.

Little did I know that this relaxing hobby and worship would end up being up an hour and a half of repenting.  Anger. Impatience.  My life is spiraling out of control and so are these cupcakes.

I don’t know when it started going downhill, but it was a snowball effect.  I should have known when I couldn’t find the icing tip and was about to start turning tables.  My first sunflower made my two year old little cousin’s sun drawing look like a Bob Ross painting… and that’s an insult to my little cousin.

Yes, I know.  It was the first time I ever did it… Calm down, Aimee. Not everyone is perfect at everything on the first try…. Except the people that are.

PERSEVERANCE.

At one point I almost gave up.  I sat at the table and ended up eating half a cupcake contemplating my life…

“Do you really want to be a quitter?  Are you going to let powdered sugar defeat you???”

I picked the icing bag back up and started to get a little bit of the hang of it. I scraped the icing off all the previously iced cupcakes and started over.

Ok. It’s not that bad..

“Perhaps you were born for such a time as this…”

It was all going so well when my piping bag busted making it lose pressure causing icing to shoot out of the sides.

I’m not a paramedic, but I’m pretty sure I applied some kind of emergency medical attention… There was no way I was losing this battle.

Not today.

I held the bag and shoved my finger in the hole and steadied my hand to ice the cupcake at the same time… (You can tell the fight that was happening just by that sentence…)

………and that’s when I realized I am insane and need more Jesus that I thought.

They aren’t perfect, but it’s a start…

(And if I see sunflowers any time soon I’m going to start screaming…)