Having all of the ingredients is no guarantee that the cake that we bake will be any good.

Following a recipe can help, we should remember that this is someone else’s idea of how the cake should be and may not necessarily be to our taste.

Even though we may be following a recipe, it doesn’t mean that the cake will turn out just as it appears in the glossy photo accompanying the recipe.

It takes practice to be able to bake a good cake consistently and, even then, each one may be slightly different from the others.

Every baking session is an individual experience, an act of creation that has many variables and therefore many possible outcomes.

Altering just one of the ingredients or steps in the process can completely change how the cake looks or tastes (or both).

It is important to start with the end in mind – you need to know at the outset what your cake will look and taste like in order that you can select the right ingredients and put them together in the right amounts.

We all have slightly different tastes in relation to our cake and we may even have a different preference depending on how we are feeling on a particular day.

It is not wise to just launch into baking a cake without the proper planning required to know with a good degree of accuracy how the finished article will turn out.

For all of us, life is a lot like baking a cake.

We all have the ingredients that we need in order to create and enjoy the life that we really want.

However, even though we have all of the ingredients, we are not guaranteed to have the life that we want if we just throw everything into a bowl and hope that it all turns out to our liking.

We still need to have a goal in mind, an idea of the sort of life that we would like to live and a plan as to how to achieve that goal.

Even then, there are still many variables and it is important to be flexible and adaptable during the process of putting the plan into action.

In life, as in baking, having all of the ingredients is no guarantee of success – we still have to put in the right effort to ensure that those ingredients are mixed together in a meaningful and satisfying way.