When I was 16 years old I was wearing a shirt two sizes too big, jeans big enough to fit two people, and a pair of white Adidas. No one knew that I had been baking for two years already.

I was in my second year of cooking class in high school. My mom once said to me, “You have to learn how to cook and bake. What if you marry someone who doesn’t know how? This way you won’t starve.”

My brother would make fun of me every time I would bake or cook something. At first, I felt that I was doing something that a boy shouldn’t be doing, but that changed when I was watching the TV show “Family Matters.” Waldo the quirky character could never do anything right. People would make him feel that he was never going to amount to anything. In the episode I was watching, he was taking a cooking class in high school. This was the episode Waldo discovered he was an excellent cook. People were proud of him and I said to myself, “if Waldo doesn’t care neither should I.” I could have easily looked at my uncle, who has been a baker for 40 years, to give me the same inspiration.

My cooking and baking days stopped when I joined the military. Living in the barracks took that option away from me.

It wasn’t until my wife and I started dating when I began to bake again. It had been so long since I had actually baked; it seemed that I was learning for the first time all over again.

The first thing we baked together was a Chocoflan. I did the majority of the work, while she dealt with all the measuring of ingredients. The first one came out perfect and for some reason I was more excited than when I had baked my first dish with my mom.

I started to look at my favorite chef to see if they had any good baking recipes. The small baking world that I was living in had expanded. I went from only baking desserts to baking full-course meals such as lemon herb chicken, chicken cordon bleu, lasagna and chicken casserole.

I will admit that I honestly don’t like to bake. I hate the prep time, cleaning, waiting, but what I hate the most is when it does not come out right and I have to start all over again. So why do I bake? I first learned how to bake because of what my mom told me. Now I bake because I enjoy knowing that people love the things I bake. As long as that doesn’t change, I won’t mind doing all the things I hate about baking.