like the island

Before I tell you about my recent baking adventures, I first want to tell you that my essay “Hateful Things,” is up at The Rumpus and you should check it out. It’s got everything–love, betrayal, heartache, fame, and a pun or two. I’ve been reading the comments because I’m shameless and so far, people have been very kind. If you’re here now because you followed the link from my bio, thanks for reading!

The ordeal started with a trip to the grocery store last week to pick up a birthday cake for my friend, who was celebrating the start of her 22nd year of life . Standing in front of the cake display at County Market, trying to decide what boring-ass single-layer chocolate cake would suffice, I had a flashback to my freshman year in the dorms when I would watch Cake Boss with my new pals and think to myself, “I could do that.” I knew my friend deserved better than the cakes I saw before me, and I also had the afternoon free. I turned on those day-old display cakes and never looked back.

I’m not a baking extraordinaire, however, so I resorted to the first box of cake mix I could find and some pre-packaged cream cheese icing on the shelf above it. So, if you’re looking to follow my recipe for this cake I made, just follow the directions on the back of Betty Crocker Super Moist (eghhh, I don’t even like typing that word) Carrot Cake Mix: dump the contents of the plastic bag, three eggs, 2/3 cup of veggie oil, and a cup of water into a medium-sized bowl and stir it for what feels like forever but is really only two and a half minutes. Dump the concoction into a pan you’d feel comfortable putting into your oven and bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 35 minutes (unless you’re using my oven, which is some sort of Hellmouth. You can take it out after about 27 minutes unless you like burnt cake.)

While the cake was in the oven, I drew up my plans for the cake decorations, as Buddy always does on Cake Boss. I had a simple design: a layer of yellow frosting covering the entire cake, three different colored flowers iced on and surrounding the words, “Happy Birthday!”, which were in pink, her favorite color.

After the cake had finished baking, I let it cool for about five minutes and then turned it over onto a sheet of wax paper so I could frost it. I’ve seen many bakers do this on television, and saw no reason why I could not do so as well, but alas here’s what happened.

In one solid tap on the bottom of this cake pan, I ruined a birthday. And so I learned my first rule of disaster preparedness: Adapt to your situation. I refused to let my friend’s birthday suck just because I got overzealous with my baking skills.I pieced the cake back together the best I could.

It looked like an earthquake had occurred in the center of my dessert. I puzzled over what to do with this mess. I was doing this, my roommate came into the room to show me a video of a woman pulling her dog out of the wreckage and debris that the tornadoes in Oklahoma left behind. It was touching, and also ending up being the second rule of avoiding potential catastrophe: watch for the signs.

Inspiration struck. My friend was recently accepted into the AmeriCorps Volunteer Organization, and come August, she will move to either San Francisco or Los Angeles to work in impoverished neighborhoods for a year. I wanted to celebrate her success in deferring her student loan payments as well, so in light of her future relocation to California, I decided to run with the earthquake theme.

I already had a lot of blue icing mixed up and didn’t want to waste it. I figured, “California’s got beaches, right?” and I went to work putting an ocean on this damned cake.

If you’re interested in learning my technique, it’s simple. Start with absolutely no experience of knowing what you’re doing and improvise as you go. I simply frosted the outer edges and covered those pesky corners first. Then, working from one edge of the cake, I made tiny sweeping gestures toward the center with a knife until they sort of resembled waves and said, “Good enough.” Then I made my roommate take a picture.

Notice that only one half of the cake is blue. This is partly because I ran out of icing and partly because I needed the other half to resemble a beach scene. I tried not to frost anything in the center because I wanted to accentuate the “fault line” of the cake, but logic dictated that water would spill into the crevice and I wanted the cake to be as realistic as possible. Also, the frosting got away from me.

Next, I took some Teddy Grahams and crushed the hell out of them until they became teeny, tiny pieces that would eventually be the “sand” for the beach scene. If you don’t have a rolling pin to expedite this process, that’s okay. Neither did I. I took a can of nonstick cooking spray and hammered away until I got the results I wanted. I added some brown sugar to the crushed up Teddies for a finer grade of sand.

I sprinkled the brown sugar and Teddy Grahams over the white icing and nearly piddled myself with glee when it actually ended up looking kind of like a beach.

I’m not sure this is an official rule of disaster preparedness, but I have heard it’s always good to be able to stay cheerful in tough situations. I certainly don’t follow this rule to a tee, but I figured I needed to have a good punch line when I showed up at the birthday party and had to tell my friend, “Sorry, I fucked up your cake, but…”

“Congrats on staying out of ‘de-fault!’” Bam. Earthquake cake.

I added some green icing that was supposed to be seaweed and a few whole Teddy Grahams (and one missing a leg) to the cake to set the scene. The trick was picking out all the ones with their arms above their heads as to depict a natural reaction to chaos and pandemonium. For morbidity, I accidentally dropped one Teddy onto the cake and he landed face down on the ocean side. My roommate made a tiny paper umbrella out of origami paper and a toothpick. We decided it offset the devastation quite nicely.

I should mention though, that while I was saving this cake and my roommate was documenting the endeavor, another cake was baking in the oven. The last rule of disaster preparedness is this: Always have a backup plan.

Earlier that day I had purchased two of all the ingredients I would need to make the cake in the event that my first attempt at being a cake boss would go horribly wrong, and in the event that any attempt to save the first cake would also end in failure. You may be thinking I had no faith in myself to successfully bake and frost a cake and, in that sense, you’re absolutely right. I never know what’s going to happen when I try something new, but I do possess the courage to keep trying even in the event of initial failure.

In the end, my friend received two cakes, thanks to a tablespoon of determination, a dash of ingenuity, a cleverly placed sheet of wax paper in the bottom of my second cake pan, and A LOT of cooking spray.