Cake Chat
Cake Chat with Amber Comadira-Smith from Cake with Amber
Amber shares her cake expertise so you can sweeten-up your cake skills and create amazing cakes with confidence !
PERFECTIONISM IS A ‘ KILLER ’ IN CAKE DECORATING As a cake decorating teacher , nothing beats the incredible feeling of watching my students sweeten their skills and gain confidence with a new decorating technique !
At the end of class , everyone is always on a high and ( rightly ) proud of their accomplishments . But every so often I will have at least one student who will lament and say “ I ’ m happy , but it ’ s not perfect …”
It just hurts my heart to see that my students have so much skill , but they don ’ t see it . I not only hear comments like this from my students , but fellow cake decorators in business as well .
“ I ’ m nowhere near being perfect , I ’ m just learning .”...“ Urgh , I hate looking at it , I made a mistake – the flowers aren ’ t straight and …”...“ I think I did ok … not the best cake I ’ ve ever done though …”
Do any of those sentences sound familiar to you ? So many of us let ‘ perfectionism ’ run the show in our head ( it tends to be best friends with the ‘ comparison game ’).
Growing up , I was a self-proclaimed perfectionist . I was always self-critiquing ( reality : selfhating ) and it carried over into my adult years . It ’ s taken me a long time to ‘ let go ’ of perfectionism in my daily life and my cake decorating work .
But here ’ s the most important thing I ’ ve learnt during my time : perfectionism is a trap . It ’ s just like a hamster wheel … you keep going and going - and going ! - but we never seem to reach it ( perfection ) or ever feel accomplished , because we ’ re constantly criticising our cake skills and thinking of what we could be doing better .
I realised I needed to overcome my perfectionist mindset when I was considering quitting my business . My family and friends helped me to see that I really was talented and profitable , but it was my perfectionism that was actually killing my joy for cake decorating .
When I started my journey to overcome that unhealthy mindset , I started to become happier and more fulfilled in my cake business ; I could appreciate my amazing cake successes , I treasured my skills and I could easily accept compliments without having that underlying criticism in my head .