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Cake, Atomic Number 900
On my birthday, last week, I served up an epic cake failure to my family. I wanted to bake my own birthday cake this year. I like baking. It’s one of those things I usually do fairly well. Baking is one of those things I enjoy doing. So I asked LOML if he’d mind not buying a cake for me and, instead, I’d work some kitchen magic. Honestly, if there’s going to be cake, most people don’t really care how it ends up on the plate, just that it does. So, bake a cake, I did.
For those of you who know me, and for those of you who say you do, you’d know when the Durnings were kids, a birthday cake wasn’t always a given. The given part was many of my family birthdays were in July and August, a time when any Mom worth her salt and leavening agent wouldn’t light the oven. Cake sometimes looked a lot like a pie from the British Fruit Market or from the St. Lawrence Market. And the cake or pie didn’t always happen on your birthday, but close enough so you knew it was your celebration. So why not bake the cake of my birthday dreams for my actual birthday date? Why not bake a coconut cake? Since I own dozens of cookbooks, I was fairly certain the author I selected—for the coconut cake recipe—was a good choice. And away I went. I weighed. I measured. I read and re-read. I preheated. I greased, papered and greased again. I toasted coconut and whipped egg whites. I folded and coddled and finally put that future bit of heaven into the oven and waited for the “ding”. “DING”. And then?
Well, and then I realized I would need a forklift to get that son of a palm tree out of the oven. That coconut cake gained more weight than I do when I dream about rum and raisin ice cream. Hokey doodle, that cake was not the airy picture of fluffiness gracing page 142 of the celebrity cookbook. Nope. No way. It was the cake that living on the prairies in the 1800s built. That was the kind of cake that survived epic disasters. That coconut cake was something a nuclear event couldn’t spoil. Goodness knows I tried to save that sucker. I figured it wasn’t anything a little buttercream—on page 168, couldn’t fix. I just needed to create some layers. In the process of creating the icing and filling, I managed to shake about three cups of confectioner’s sugar on my T-shirt, shorts and the kitchen floor. And we all know how that powdery sweetness spreads when the Dyson fan swivels. Talk about birthday fun and games. The spackle/buttercream recipe should have been in the Reader’s Digest Home Repair book. It resisted when I tried to spread it around. The harder I tried to make that cake edible, the harder I laughed. Oh, I served that mass of buttercream and toasted coconut. I’ve still got a sense of humour. Son of mine suggested it might be missing something after he tasted and then politely pushed his plate away. Granddaughter wasn’t having any part of it and LOML politely ate what was plopped in front of him because, honestly, it sort of looked like a birthday cake. After the guests left, the balance of the cake landed in the green bin. Sweetie pie took off for the grocery store and came home with a McCain’s cake. I wasn’t offended. He didn’t apologize, because twice in one day he got to eat cake.
On Sunday morning, three days after my birthday, we noticed our green bin had been raided by a family of raccoons. Funny thing is, they left the cake. Perhaps they’re waiting for leftover birthday pie, or maybe they’re on a low carb diet.
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