This site is up and running! Give it some time to accumulate posts since I’m starting from scratch, will ya?  Now that I am on a sabbatical, I promise to bake more often.

In the meantime, please check back often!

This favourite number of mine – First of May by Olivia Ong – is dedicated to Sugar Asterope, my beloved golden retriever who recently passed on.  You’ll be forever loved, and forever missed.

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A brand new beginning totally unintended and unplanned for.

This site has been sorely neglected for the past 3 years.  At some point in time, it did ever cross my mind to shut it down for good.  Not because it costs a lot (in every sense) to maintain, but more so because a blog without new posts is as good as dead.

That was until a very dear friend asked me one day if I would resume blogging regularly – she said that she missed seeing new photos of my bakes for she loves looking at them when she needs some cheering up.

Her comment gave me pause.  I didn’t know my blog had that effect on her, or for that matter, it might possibly be bringing cheer to other readers as well.   You see, getting nothing but requests for recipes from some passerby readers could become quite irksome and I was getting tired.

I decided to put things into perspective instead. Not everyone who visited my site wanted to push my buttons and test my limits.   Through the blog, I met several like-minded bloggers and also had a regular group of readers which I had unfortunately lost after an absence of 3 years.  I enjoyed the interaction and the writing.   More importantly, I also enjoy baking and photographing.

Restarting regular baking wasn’t that difficult once changes were made to my portfolio at work.  Re-familiarising myself with the intricate process of blogging on a self-hosted site was.   I ran into several technical issues when I tried to upgrade the WP version I had installed.  Nothing worked, and I was finally desperate enough to delete the whole blog and start afresh.  Even that didn’t work.   Finally technical support suggested a hard re-set i.e. wiping out every single file in the account including the email account I created.

Which was just as well. I cringed as I read some of the old posts and was mentally making a list of ‘improvements’ to be done to the site anyway.  Now the list is no longer needed.

All previous posts and comments are completely gone.  Forever.  I didn’t back-up.  Rather, I chose not to back-up although I did save all the posts in pdf format for reference.   In retrospect, it was less painful than I thought.  Perhaps I should use a similar strategy to purge some ‘toxins’ out of my life.

I don’t intend to re-use the old posts much, in fact, none if I could help it, so it might take a while to rebuild the site again.   If you were a faithful reader from the blog of my previous ‘era’, you would already have a glimpse into my personal blogging style.  If you had liked it, then I would like to invite you to stay tuned for more.

To my new readers, let me extend a warm welcome to you!  To start off, you may wish to begin with some house rules first.

Let’s bring it on!