Death or Cake: The Cake is a LIE....VE... ALIVE!!!!

When I was in my senior year of high school, we had a saying in my rather tiny but well loved class: They go on and on about how great it is to be a senior, but they never tell you about how much work it is.

Yes, being a senior was great, especially when we got to go through other people's classes randomly rubbing the fact that this was our last year of high school in their jealous faces, but no one ever told us we'd be forced to preform manual labor for the school and ourselves in order to pass the year. Yard sales? I never want to see another one in my life. Pizza? I'm still hesitant to eat it if I get it from a restaurant anymore. (Not because it was bad or anything, just because we had to order so much of it every week I got sick of the smell and taste.) And if I have to bake another red velvet cake, I will gladly throw myself into an insane asylum.

Am I that desperate to avoid baking, you wonder briefly?

Yes.

Why? You sorta kinda almost wonder, but not really.

Because I was nearly brutally mauled by one when I had to make one for the senior fundraiser we were organizing so we could make money to go on our senior trip.

What happened? You think skeptically secretly thinking "How can anyone be brutally mauled by a cake of any kind?"

Keep reading, blog reader, and you shall know.

It all started with a bake sale to help raise money for our senior trip to D.C. All the seniors and juniors (for we were two VERY small classes) were to bake pies and cakes then sell them to people in the church, neighborhood, and where ever else we could expect to mooch some cash off people to get enough money to saved up. This wasn't as easy as it sounds for all of us had to contend with those little girl scouts selling their diabolical cookies of cuteness.

Some of us (namely me) considered taking them on and running them off (cause I mean we were bigger than them, and that place outside of Walmart was a choice selling place) but my class mates were against me... I suspect it had something to do with the fact we'd all seen the Pacifier and weren't willing to get our butts kicked by a bunch of tiny ninjas wearing pigtails. Cowards. We totally could have taken them. (Okay, so I did see their point. If we tried to get them somewhere with no witnesses to avoid shame should we get our butts kicked, it would look like we were some kind of weird pedophiles. I didn't want to do hard time. I had a test later that week. At least, I'm pretty sure I did. We had at least a quiz or test of some kind every week, so I'm pretty sure I was pointedly not studying...uh...forgetting to study for something - how else would I have all that extra time to come up with ways of avoiding getting publicly humiliated by nine year olds?....uh... I was.... booked and studying really hard. So it was best we didn't take on the Girl Scouts.... Hi mom.... Love you.)

If I was going to get my butt kicked I had to make sure I had plausible deniability - in other words, no witnesses...uh work on securing places to do the bake sale, then I had to make sure I had all my studying done.

As it was when the day came, lots of orders came pouring our way and we split up who would take what. Pumpkin pies, pecan pies, red velvet cake - numerous sugary desserts. I had a lot of orders, but I could handle it. I loved making pies. Pies were easy. They did what I asked of them. They cooperated. I like pie. If I told it to mix, it mixed lovely. If I told it to bake, it did so with out quarrel. I told it to cool, it cooled quietly.

Then I had to make the red velvet cake.

Here's where my troubles began.

The blasted thing was rebellious from the start. I told it to mix, and it clumped, so I beat it and it sloshed me. I tried to pour it into a pan hoping to fill it half way, but it became greedy and decided to take up most of the room.

At this point, the cake and I were not on good terms, but I was keeping my chin up and putting on a brave front - anything to make the cake cooperate. I thought "Okay, I'll let you take up most of the room in the pan. Just so long as you bake like a good yummy dessert is supposed to bake." I prayed it wouldn't give me any more trouble.

Pffff- DAHahahahahaha! No more trouble. Right. Like that would ever happen. What was I thinking?

Around 2:30 that afternoon, I took a break for I had been cooking all day. I thought I would relax and watch a little TV, or play on the computer and listen to music (or all three because my ADD is cool like that), but a few minutes later, I heard a rather odd noise and smelled a rather odd smell. I knew something was up when I heard a gurgling sound coming from the oven followed a high pitched whistle.

I got up to investigate and opened the oven to reveal a horrid, lumpy monster rising from the remains of the cake pan that was hidden somewhere beneath all its disfiguredness. My brain, in the panic that now gripped it, decided it would be a good idea to grab another cake pan, and scoop out some of the extra cake batter that was threatening to take over my oven and burn my house down.

This wasn't a very good idea.

Actually this was a terrible idea.

At the time it seemed like a good idea because the insides of the cake were still a bit soupy, but I'm telling you right now, never do this. Especially if you and the cake weren't on good terms to begin with. If you do this after you have battled a demon cake, it will not be happy with you.

Well, in retrospect I can see how it would be unhappy with me for trying to distribute it between two pans when it out grew the one. If some one covered you with strange gooey substances, beat you with a metal whisk, put you in a circular metal cage without a ceiling, stuck you in the fiery furnace of Hell to bake at 450 degrees, then decided to come back and scoop out your brains and distribute them into another circular cage and expect you to be okay with all of it, you'd probably want to give them a piece of your mind too... If you could find it.

I should have realized it then that there was going to be trouble. I should have noticed the signs: failure to cooperate on many levels, the growing discomfort of the cake in its.....lair, the inability to cook like a normal cake, choosing instead to rise up like Frankenstein's monster....

But I didn't. Nope. Sure didn't. I went back sometime later to check on it expecting it to go something like this:

^ The Oven of Awesomeness
(Star pic by DeathofCaelum here:
http://deathofcaelum.deviantart.com/art/StarShot-178647926)

I expected to open the unassuming oven, to reveal an oven of awesomeness where two beautiful (if not slightly damaged) twin red velvet cakes would emerge and we would all celebrate that they overcame the monstrosity that had nearly consumed them and my oven. Heavenly music would have sounded from with in the confines of the oven, and rainbows would shoot out and birds would sing (hopefully not from inside the oven cause I have a thing about finding feathers or worse things inside my cakes).

In stead, something went terribly, terribly wrong.

At first I didn't see the danger, for the angle I was at, I could see the contents of the oven. I reached inside and slid out the shelf, then suddenly the red velvet cake lunged at me. It was neither solid nor liquid, living nor dead, and it was very, very angry at me. It hissed at me, and I lurched back in surprise.

They growled a death threat to me in the language of pastries and sugary goodness evil. I was pretty sure it was about to suck the soul out of my body and eat it. I had to think fast or this twin plague on cake kind would envelope my whole oven and then... the world! Or worse - my house.

I stood my ground and declared my warning:

"Turn back into a good, proper cake and no harm will come to you! If you refuse, you choose death!"

In the end, I had to start over from scratch. There was nothing even resembling a cake in that oven. After ward it sorta turned out alright, but the cake looked kind of groggy and disgruntled, like while it was trying to sleep through the baking processes it was suffering from the ghosts of the two previous cakes that now haunted my oven. I covered it with the appropriate icing, and it didn't look quite so bad, but it was still giving me the evil eye. I was glad I didn't have to deal with it for much longer.

I sent it on its way come bake sale day, and have never cooked another red velvet cake since.