The Baked Goods

Cakes, arthritis, co-dependency.  My top 3 areas of research as of late.  I wonder how often they turn up in the same sentence in the entire history of writing.  Any statisticians in the readership?  Could prove a mildly interesting Vegas alternative for the betting crowd.  Or, maybe not.

In pursuit of building a bigger, better, tastier birthday cake, I broke out my updated version of "Joy of Cooking" and perused the section devoted to the anatomy of a cake.  Learned more about the differences between whipping and mixing, and time differentials with handheld electric mixers versus their countertop behemoth cousins, than I ever truly needed to know.  And, evidently, those were NOT the facts I should have committed to my ever-failing memory before making this year's mouth-watering coconut-lemon curd confection for Sarah.  The paragraph on not adding too much batter to one pan, and inadvertantly leaving out half of the leavening, would have saved my entire day efforts AND costly ingredients.  Sigh. 

Doubling the recipe and finding myself one pan short, I filled the three pans at my disposal with the divided contents of the missing fourth pan.  A gamble, I knew.  I sensed the baked results were a bit on the heavy side.  But I pressed on.  The completed construction was visually perfect.  Unfortunately, the sawing action required to cut down and through the layers was our clue that all was not as it seemed.  Though I completed a slice on principle, Sarah and her boyfriend were entirely unable to do much more than lick the lemon curd layers and nibble on the buttercream frosting.  The cake itself was almost entirely void of the lovely air pockets which create lightness of being: it was as if several hundred cakes decided to compress themselves into one dense thunk! of cooked chewy batter.  THREE TIMES OVER!  A fossil could have been hiding in the depths! 

We played our own little bet-free guessing game as to its weight, taking into consideration the covered glass serving dish: I emerged victorious with 13 pounds!  At least I could own that one small triumph.  It took me a week to screw up the courage to throw it out.  There were several episodes of hefting it from the GE Profile fridge so that I could simply gaze in disgust at the failed attempt and wallow in self-pity.  In between those moments, I dug out lemon curd with a pickaxe; chipped away at the coconut-flavored covering; and, sent a few substantial slices over to my sugar-craving neighbor who insisted it couldn't  be THAT bad.  Wonder what he thought when he had to lift it out of the front loader with his bad back?! 

Because I've never erred in such a manner as this since my newlywed flub nearly 22 years ago with the backward recipe of buttermilk GRAVY and biscuits -- envision if you will a sweet young wife, eager to pleasingly fill her new husband's stomach with a hearty breakfast, both of them sitting at the table, forks having endured several increasingly hesitant trips from plate to mouth, before the despairing man finally breaks, "Babe, I love you, but I can't eat another bite of this!" and pushes the offending muddled melange away, with the cook quickly following suit in embarrassed relief -- I demanded a replay from myself over the weekend.  I'm pleased to announce that I got it right.  (Only one snafu marred an otherwise out-of-the-park second attempt: it appears a weighty feline, coincidentally himself weighing 13 pounds, trod on the towel-covered corner of one layer.  Thus, a perfectly flavorful cake with gorgeous texture but of flawed physical presence!)  This morning, my son crowed that it was, and is, simply "the best cake ever made!"  As far as marriages go, coconut and lemon are a perfect culinary match in the dessert world.

Well, where have all my words gone?  Surprise, surprise -- to the food.  So much for bemoaning the sudden onset of seeming osteo-arthritis in my fingers over the past two months -- we'll save that for the post-visit-to-the-rheumatologist -- or discussing my emerging understanding of where I end and my much beloved drug-addicted younger brother begins.  Perhaps if they floated in a sea of tart lemon curd or rolled about in creamy coconut yumminess, they would have earned a few more lines.

There's always next time.  Did I mention our cat has been missing for a day and never in three years has this been the case?  My eldest child is beside herself.  I sure hope and pray he's locked in someone's garage or car and the owners have simply been napping away the sunshine hours!