I live with my husband Brian and 2 cats Molly and Napoleon (who are both spoiled rotten). Also, I'm a biologist working in a virology lab I love baking- specifically cookies and cakes (I hate pie). I'm not very good at decorating the cakes I bake, so I need to work on that a bit! I also love cooking Mexican and Italian foods and I love eating Indian food (but I'm not very good at making it, I can't get the spices right). I'm a vegetarian and have been for over 10 years. I find it fun to take a traditional recipe with meat in it and substitute in vegetarian alternatives to see what I come up with. Baking cookies at Christmas. Although last Christmas my whole family seemed to be on a diet and didn't want to be tempted by any cookies. Making homemade pizza dough. It is so good. I top the piza with hot banana pepper rings, or maybe kalamata olives and capers, so delicious. Also, everyone in my family loves my carrot cake. I'm not that good at decorating cakes, but with my carrot cake I make mini marzipan carrots to go on top of the cake. It looks really cute. Oh dear, where to begin. Once I tried to make cut-out sugar cookies and use fat-free margarine. They shriveled up in the oven and looked like little crackers! My husband and I made shortbread cookies one year and accidentally put in cornstarch instead of powdered sugar. The cookies crumbled like sand when you touched them. I made pizza dough once and one of my rings on my fingers slipped off into the dough when I was kneading it and got baked! Once in college I was heating oil in a pan to make tortilla espanola and it caught fire- oops. Recently I got a kit to make homemade mozarella cheese from milk. Lets just say I've tried numerous times and only succeeded 2 times so far (but I will keep practicing). My best advice is if you are making food to serve someone else/bring to a party, use a recipe that you are familiar with- don't experiment!