With the challenge of Britain’s National Baking Week set before me, this weekend I did the unthinkable: I baked.

And baked and baked and baked.

I’ll admit I was a bit rusty. I warmed up by baking brownies Saturday morning, which might have been considered cheating. I used Trader Joe’s Ready to Bake Brownies, which has to be the most user-friendly brownie mix on the market. It dulls the intelligence. Anyone capable of opening a packet, pouring contents into a greased brownie pan and sliding it into a pre-heated oven can do it. The results are fantastic, but where is the sense of accomplishment?

Brownies for dummies. And yes, you'll notice I forgot to grease the pan. This mix was made for me.

On Sunday, I made a two-layer yellow cake using a recipe I found online last week (yes, I’ve baked two weekends in a row. This might be a personal record) and then after I put the cake pans into the oven, I realized with dismay that I had promised my son I was going to make cupcakes, not a cake!

He was very brave about it and told me it was okay. We could make cupcakes another day. Which made me feel even worse and so, there began the third baking project of the weekend – cupcakes, using the same winning yellow cake recipe. In the making of this batch, I ran out of granulated sugar and was not going to make my second trip to the grocery store so I subbed the rest of the measurement with brown sugar. It ended up working out very well – moist, delicious and not too sweet. Sense of accomplishment? Oh yes!

With the lack of granulated sugar in the house, I couldn’t make the homemade chocolate frosting I had planned and I didn’t have enough butter to do a traditional buttercream so I cracked open a can of Betty Crocker cream cheese frosting and called it a day. Or rather, a weekend.

Mission accomplished.