Cakemess Revisited, or Wilton Cake Decorating Class 4...Almost

Sweet heavens. If there has ever been a cursed cake-ing experience, it has been the relationship I have struck up with my dear friend, Wilton.

This isn't Wilton's fault. In fact, Wilton has been nothing but a gentleman. He arrived with detailed diagrams, concise to-do lists, and glossy photos. He came politely, without fuss, neatly boxed. He was nothing but proper on all fronts.

I, however, am a constant mess, moving from one catastrophe to another in true Maria form. They say that baking a science...I make it look more like a bad science project. No level of boxing or diagramming is going to work to effectively contain my mess. And poor Wilton has born the brunt of my recent kitchen anxieties.

This past weekend, bad weather and all, I did a colossal amount of baking. So much so that I did what I never do: I delegated. I'm a control freak (as ironic as that sounds coming from a certified self-proclaimed klutz), and "letting go" has never been one of my strong points; however, on Saturday afternoon, covered in flour, I turned to my brother (and co-cake-decorator in crime) and said I was too tired to make this week's cakes and icing. All we needed was two round cakes, iced, and the icing as laid out in Wilton's polite handbook.

He accepted. I sighed. I delegated completely and left it in his capable hands.

His capable, yet disorganized hands.

Sunday morning my brother started baking our cakes at 12:30 for a 2 pm class. When I walked into the kitchen at 1:15 and he was lifting a cake out of the oven, and the second sitting on the counter still in liquid form, I gasped. Not only at the time, but also at the fact that Simon's lack of planning had poured one mix into a square pan that was headed for the oven. Still, I decided to let go. We had one round cake, totally useable. We could decorate together.

Except he hadn't actually checked the cake. It looked done, but as you and I know, a cake is not a cake until a testing poke has been done into the centre of the cake to ensure a thorough bake.

This cake wiggled like jell-o when you merely touched the surface of the cake.

I felt my heartbeat rising.

My Mom assured me it would be OK. Simon went to work on the icing. Now that he was flustered, though, he misread the instructions for the icing. Really misread the instructions. Instead of two cups of shortening he thought he read two cubes of shortening. That's right, he put two freakin' packages of shortening into the mixer (my beautiful, cherished mixer). At that moment I asked what he was doing and was met with a very curt "do you want me to do this or not?" which had me turning on my heel and leaving the kitchen, heartbeat only slightly accelerated.

Ten minutes later I came back into the kitchen. There was Simon, quietly scraping the mixing bowl directly into the garbage. As I stood and watched him, I caught my Mom out of the corner of my eye attempting to flip the uncooked cake onto a tray. She lifted the pan tentatively, took one look at the cakemess, and gently replaced the lid.

There was no fodder for this fire needed. By now I was hopping mad and barely able to contain myself. I mean, really, it was an innocent enough mistake, but the situation was infuriating and if my Mom said "oh don't worry, icing a warm cake will make the icing just glide on" one more time I was going to go ballistic.

It was now after 2:30. We had no cake, except the hot square cake just out of the oven, no icing, and no time. There was nothing polite or well behaved about our kitchen. My mother attempted to assuage our anxieties by suggesting we go and buy a cake from the local grocery store, but we were still icing less.

Still, we pressed on. Simon made our icing, while Mom attempted to flip the square cake. Unfortunately, Simon had forgotten to flour the bottom of the pan, so what flipped out was another jumbled mess.

It was at this moment that I surveyed the kitchen. I saw my Mother frantically piecing a shitty cake back together again and my brother nervously filling icing bags with shitty icing. It was ten minutes to class and an executive decision needed to be made.

"Why don't we just skip it," I said unexpectedly. "Because it is the last class, and you'll learn how to finish your rose!" my Mom replied adamantly. I shook my head "Mom, I don't care if I never learn how to make a rose, and frankly none of our icing is good and stiff enough to really make a rose anyway", I countered. Simon stopped and looked at me "yeah," he added, "lets stay home".

We were beat, and frustrated. I had already exhausted myself with a private cry in the living room (rule of thumb: Maria and stress almost always equals a little cry), the kitchen was a disaster, and the cake we had looked like this.

The deed was done.

After the kitchen was (silently) cleaned, and the tempers had cooled, the icing bags were filled and waiting on the counter to go into the fridge. I pulled open my Wilton box, fetched the Wilton book with the diagrams, flipped a flat bottomed round bowl over and said "Come here, Simon, we're going to ice a cake".

Week four was supposed to be decorating our "graduation cakes", showing off all the techniques we had learned, and Simon and I did just that. In our case, we have an Uncle Jack who is having a birthday soon. He lives in Nova Scotia, so we won't get to see him. This also means that although we might decorate a cake for him, he won't get to eat it...so it doesn't matter that his cake was actually a flat-bottomed round bowl with icing!

We practiced all our techniques - the writing and drop flowers, the shell border and stars, dots and squiggles. No roses, but everything else. The finished product was actually a pretty cute little cake, if I do say myself!

As for the weird square cake, my Mom took the remnants of our icing and tapped into her artistic vein, creating an oddly pretty cake reminiscent of impressionist painters. It was a mess, really, but fun and silly, and made the cake look worth eating again.



And that's exactly what we did. Mom made a pot of tea and we sat by the big window in our kitchen where the threatening sky finally peeled open and rained harder than it has in ages. It rained so hard that hail came out of the sky, adding the most oddly perfect symphony to the craziness of our day.

As we watched all of our annuals await their certain death my Mother smiled, sighed and said "at least there's cake. If you need solace in a constant - there's still cake".

I'll eat to that.