Once Bitten

One of the things I did while you were away was this, I did a cake decorating class. I didn't really want to do it. It was a holiday gift from my well-intentioned husband, groan. After all, what working mother has time for cake decorating? A cleaning lady, now that is a gift every mother could use. And, I'll tell you this, my husband certainly wasn't doing any laundry while I was away.

What ended up happening is that I went t0 work and whined about it. Whine and complained until one of the doctors that I work with got so fed up that she decided to take the class with me just so she could prove me wrong and get me to shut-up already. Every Wednesday for a month we went to class at the local high school. For three hours a week we crumb-layered and iced and piped and rolled and so on. We were placed in the beginners group on the grounds that neither of us had any formal training. That is when I decided it was a competition between me and that richie doctor with her fancy MD degree. I secretly spent each class peering over at her work, jumping at the chance to laugh hard at her mistakes. It was a lot of fun. One time I laughed so hard at her Big Bird cake that I squirted blue icing out of my icing bag and onto my Cookie Monster cake. That was not funny.

The story doesn't end there, though. It was a little bit fun. Because we also laughed at and with the people in our class. There was a 60-something father of two with gobs of money who was there to learn a hobby and establish residency so his youngest could go to UCLA. There was the 60-something Japanese granny with limited English skills who had never, ever heard of Sesame Street let alone Big Bird (you should have seen her Big Bird cake on Sesame Street day!). The four of us were way copacetic, laughing and joking and secretly trying to one up each other in Beginning Cake Decorating. There was a T.A. with the sorriest bunch of decorating skills I had ever seen. Lastly there was the head honcho, Miss Linda.

Now, Miss Linda was a piece of work. She was probably about 5'5" tall, and 300-lbs. She was chronically breathless, could hardly walk, and had perfected the eye-roll and huffy breath. She had mad skills. She was also a bit celebrity, having appeared on some cake show as a contestant and then later a judge. On both wrists she wore braces due to injury after years of squeezing icing bags and rolling fondants. Several of her toes were numb from her years of living as a diabetic in a cake store. When she walked she would grab on to the nearest counter, or chair, or person then shuffle her feet until she could grab onto the next object in front of her. If you were that object and you were in deep crap, one false move and you were both toast. Linda love to slap the icing bag out of your hand for poorly piped decor, and then growl at you mercilessly as she showed you the right way to do it.

Idle chatter is how we spent our time as we worked on those cakes, so by the end of the class we all knew each others' life stories. My family's diet was no secret to the rest of my group, who was supportive and curious. As a self-proclaimed food snob, I'm accustomed to receiving lots of feedback about my snobby and wayward living. One day Linda and the T.A. were simply agog when they learned I am a vegetarian. Upon sneerily proclaiming it to the entire class (the Intermediate and Advanced groups shared the same home economics classroom with us), she loudly announced "my God woman, you know you're gonna DIEEEEEEEEE from that." Then she avoided me for the rest of the class like I had The Clap, which was fine by me because it was flower week and my roses were looking really shitty and quite frankly I was afraid of her.

But, we loved Linda and it turns out that I liked cake decorating. No my husband did not try to get a load in or pack the kids' lunches or clip their toe nails. But when the month was winding down, Tricia and I were on the quest for more cake knowledge. Linda invited us to come to some classes at her store for free! Because she liked us so much! But she wanted me to eat some Spam before I came because I made her uncomfortable with so much asparagus blood.

And that is what we did. We drove down San Diego on Monday nights and sat in a big class room with 25-inland women far, far away from our tight knit group of beachcombers. And then we signed up for more classes! Fondant! Drawing on your cake! Rolled butter cream!

It wasn't too long before the office found out about our skills, soon we were in charge of the desserts for each celebratory event at the office. Baby showers. 50th birthday. Saint Patrick's Day. Office manager's birthday. Usually, Tricia baked half the cake, I baked the other half. We both filled our own and then I would decorate. It had been going along well until recently. After a long night of call, Tricia came home and baked her cake all the while struggling to keep her eyes open. Then she dropped them off to my house, where I was supposed to carve them, crumb them and then decorate them.

We were making a baby shower cake for one of the young women who worked our reception desk. I had the cakes centered on the counter while I was working on making a Hispanic skin tone frosting, which isn't easy. Everything was well out of Maggie's reach.


It turns out it wasn't out of Nutmeg's reach. My poor mom began screaming in absolute despair, and I turned around to the above horror. My heart sank. I had 12-hours to make a new cake and fill it and crumb it and ice it and decorate it and it was already close to midnight (give or take 3-hours). Which is what I did.





And we all lived happily ever after. And this baby got eaten. And the mama was very happy. And everyone, ev-errrr-yyy-one, thought this baby looked just like what the new baby will probably look like. And so there you go.