In short, yes the objectives I had set for this project were fulfilled. To elaborate, my objectives for this posting were to understand the theory behind baking and using it, to dedicate time into refining my baking skills and to bake something delicious and visually appetizing for my family. For the past 4 weeks, I realized that understanding the theory behind baking came naturally as soon as I attended the online course hosted by yuppiechef. Not only that, by putting the knowledge into practice all the theory started making sense and helped me fulfil my objective of refining my baking skills and creating delicious desserts, some of which I even made changes to, to appease my palate.

 

Trials and errors. Often times this can be the most frustrating part about experimenting. However this time I came around to enjoy it the most as making mistakes not only made me more diligent with my choices but also helped me understand the process of baking better.

 

The most challenging part about this project was organizing. Let it be my time or my tasks, I struggled organizing in the beginning. Baking required time however not all the minutes are spent on making the dessert. 70% of the time I either had to revise my recipe or fulfil other elements of my task like shopping for groceries or making different elements of my dessert which don’t necessary involve baking like making the frosting. Tasks like these although are small may influence the outcome greatly. I had to make sure I planned out every minute of my designated bake time to make sure my final outcome turned out well. In the first two weeks of my project, I hit a few bumps in organizing my tasks properly, this resulted in insufficient ingredients, melted frosting from letting in out on counter too long and a failed cake because I didn’t pay enough attention to the instruction from being distracted by my other baking project. 

 

Learning from online sources has been a huge success to me. I cannot believe how much of a learning curve baking has been to me with only online baking tips and recipes. I started with little to no knowledge and I ended up with so much new information that has made me capable of baking a variety of desserts. 

Not only that my last dessert cream cheese tarts with strawberry sauce has been a huge success. I incorporated all the new knowledge I attained and managed to make something so delicious which turned out to be a crowd pleaser.

 

The recipes I chose. I opted for easier recipes since I was afraid of failing. However, I wish I would have given recipes with harder techniques a go as that would’ve enabled me to learn newer skills.

Throughout the whole elective posting, I think I have managed to achieve my objectives which are to learn and understand simple daily Mandarin Chinese expressions, to be able to communicate in Mandarin with basic expressions and to be familiar with Mandarin Chinese pronunciation and characters. Learning mandarin through an online platform does come with a lot of challenges but with all the adequate content and files provided by the platform, I think I have managed to learn a lot of basic mandarin phrases and words that can be used in daily conversation. I went from knowing nothing about mandarin to at least recognizing simple sentences and phrases. However, I am still trying to be familiar with the Chinese character as each word has its own unique character.

I really enjoyed the practice questions and quizzes that were provided by the platform because I am able to test myself right after learning a new topic. It helps me to identify which words or characters that I still need to work on. 

The most challenging part about learning chinese mandarin was to get the phonetic pronunciation of each character or pinyin correctly. As this online platform serves a one way communication, it is hard to ensure that we pronounce each character correctly as there is no one to refer to. 

One of my plans for the 3rd week was to create a mini dictionary and I thought it works for me. For each week, we will be given new words for us to learn and memorise and since i have started the mini dictionary, I can easily refer back to the words that i have jotted down whenever i forgot. 

I think it would be better if we can get a two way communication for this course since it will help a lot in correcting the pronunciation directly with the tutor and it will be easier for us direct our question.