“Ye shall offer up a cake of the first of your dough for an heave offering: as ye do the heave offering of the threshingfloor, so shall ye heave it.”

I hate baking. 
Well, I hated it from 8AM-12:30PM yesterday.  :-]  We had a different instructor,  and the pace was very different.  It was good to learn from someone new, but hard to adjust for this (hmm, shall we say more mature) culinary student.  In that period of time we produced a creme anglaise, an ice cream base, a sorbet base, a chocolate souffle and a sponge cake.  Our souffle exploded, our ice cream base overcooked, and our sponge cake didn't look like anyone elses after baking.  I cleaned up the souffle ramekin as best I could, garnished it with raspberries and powdered sugar to hide some defects and plated it with a tiny bowl of creme anglaise.  I strained the ice cream base through a fine chinois twice, poured it into a hotel pan with lots of surface area and put that pan in an ice bath in order to cool it down as fast as possible (we were behind).  I just mourned over the sponge cake.  Did I mention the new chef was the Executive of the entire program??  I went on our lunch break, to lick my wounds, anticipating... the worst afternoon know to man.  It was going to be filled with a horrible cake and inedible ice cream. "Do the god's hate me",  I cried.  "I don't belong in a commercial kitchen;  I can't keep the pace; I am a failure"... is there anyone out there as sick of this mantra as I am?  :-]  Oh wait, there is more - we were fortunate enough to have yet another different chef for the afternoon... can I crawl in a hole now?
There was a lot of self talk during the lunch break that consisted of "Gayle, are you a quitter?",  "Stop feeling sorry for yourself", "Dry your tears and toughen up", and then some sweet fellow students came over and kept me company for a few minutes, which freed me from a continuation of overused aphorisms, and we entered into that wretched kitchen once again, but I was ready to make the best of it.
What do you think happened?  Our sponge cake was the only one properly cooked, the chef went straight for our ice cream base, tasted it and loved it and we produced an Italian meringue buttercream icing which could not have gone more swimmingly. 
Sometimes in life, says this wise, old sage, we are given the gift of immediate satisfaction (my experience of the low and the high all in one day) but more often it is the longer road of delayed satisfaction.  I hope I have learned this lesson.  As Winston Churchill once said, "Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." Or, my favorite resource, the Bible says, " Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.   (Psalm 27:14)   Okay, maybe that is a little vehement for culinary school, yet the principle applies.