Helpless

I don’t know what it is about cakes, but to me they’re like a landmark of success. To bake a nice cake for company is like surpassing a certain landmark in life, reaching a certain level of achievement. In France, I tried so desperately to transform that oven into a cake producing machine… and always without success.

Don’t get me wrong, I make delicious desserts. I can create a tiramisu from scratch that you’d die for, chocolate cookies that’ll give you a sweet tooth even if you never had one before, brownies that demand to be fought for. But cakes remain an impossible feat.

Today was no exception. With my grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins coming for dinner, wine and football, I figured it was a special enough occasion to make dessert. And since I just received business cards and media coverage yesterday at work, I was feeling pretty powerful. It was time to take on the cake.

My mother was cleaning upstairs. My brother and father were rooting my cousin on in his college basketball game. I had just finished a bit of weekend-work and found myself a box for yellow food cake – figuring if it came from a box, there was no way in hell I could screw it up. Wrong.

Despite following the directions perfectly, when I took the cake out of the oven, I noticed its deformities. It didn’t exactly rise… still a dense, moist sponge-like coagulation of batter heavy on the bottom of the pan. And when I tried to shake it out of the tin, some stubbornly clung to the sides and creases, leaving me with a lopsided, ovalish mound of yellow fluff.

Don’t worry: Because it’s my family and they still like me despite my cake-making-debilities, we ate it anyways ~ frosted with a good round of laughter and buried under Strabucks’ Java Chip ice cream.

Both dinner and game ended a while ago but I can’t leave the kitchen. This cake is currently on the counter mocking me. Half the size it should be and propped up by a MilkyWay, it’s a reminder of my failed obstacle, unaccomplished goal.

But I ain’t sceerrred. I’ll dominate that cake mix next time.

You’ll see.