Safety is like the best chocolate cake.

Mark Donnelly

I wanted to bake a chocolate cake the other day to satisfy my brains craving for pleasure. So I went

onto Google to find the best chocolate cake recipe. Wow...3 300,347 pages devoted to making the

best chocolate cake. Professional chefs, cooks, mums and dads, kids, and not to forget good old

grandma, were all represented. They were all telling us passionately about the best way, the only way,

that studies have even proved it ways, how to bake a chocolate cake. I got confused.

So I looked at a few blogs on baking a cake, and there they were, all these different people arguing

about the best way to bake a chocolate cake. Some professional chefs in total distaste to some of the

ideas and concepts the lesser cooks and kids were saying, decided it was best to not bother anymore

with trying to help those who just did not want to learn their best ways, so they went back to just

writing books and talking with other professional chefs where it was not possible for anyone to argue

with them.

After many weeks of searching for the best recipe and techniques, I was still as confused as ever. My

brain was “so desiring” the chocolate fix it needed, and boiled lollies just was not satisfying the craving

my addicted brain wanted. I was getting desperate to a point that I was going to just pick anything, the

latest thing. It was an extremely confusing task...how was I going to decide what was to be the best

cake to make. Who should I listen to, what advice should I take? I was getting more and more

desperate and confuzzeled. All those ideas and best practices were filling my empty vessels...what

should I do?

I thought, I have had some pretty bad cakes made by professional chefs, I have had some dry cakes

made by cooks, I have always had something different from mums and dads, and I have some

wonderful cakes made by kids (the ones filled with mars bars and jelly beans and dirt), but the best

cakes I have ever had were always baked by good old grandma.

She used the old basic tried and true methods, she used the basic tools (none of those new fancy side

scraping electric mixers), she used real butter and real cream, there was no fake sugar or low carb

flour, and those farm laid eggs she used, she only needed two not three. She used an oven not a

microwave and when she took the cake out and let it rest, you could see that perfection was not that

complicated. I think you all know what I mean, there are great cakes made by outdates, even if not

perfect.

There is not one person alive today with the answer to ‘best practice’ or for that matter the answer to

anything. New age fixes, systems, ideas, tastes, theories, concepts, ideologies, rules, processes etc, are

all based from one key element...the basics. In 500 years from now, I dare say that we will look back to

the year 2014 and say, how did we make it this far; the kids back then were educated in such a

programmed and linear ways, workers had no freedom to make choices, safety was a fix not a

solution...if only they knew what we know now.

I think it’s time we get back to basics (BTB safety). We need to slow down and stop growing the tree of

over-complication. The world, the nature of things, us, do not operate well on basis of complexity

(even though each is complex), it operates on simplicity. We seem to think that by complicating

something, this something will be solved. People think that because something sounds complex and

more intelligent, it must be better.

Complexity is like having a machine that has too many parts that can fail (something engineers know

about). I would rather have a wooden spoon that mixes a cake than an complex machine, because

regardless of engineering, power supply, mechanical failure and possible risk of getting my tongue

caught in-between the mixing blades, the wooden spoon is a basic tool that has passed the test of time

and will last.

Get out there and give simplicity a go. Do a basic risk assessment, do a good old consultation chat with

a worker, tell, listen, learn, respect, act. We might just see that all this safety jargon is

overcomplicated; we might just find that the basics really do work. That being human and treating

people how you would want to be treated works just fine.

Anyway, I finally baked my cake using a basic recipe from grandma’s book and it turned out just fine, it

was as perfect as it needed to be. It looks a bit messy but tasted divine.