Cake. February 28, 2008

Oh Lord, I loathe even the beginning of this abhorently muttonheaded yarn. It all started with a trip to the Hlynkas’. A spur of the moment affair, on a whim of pure avoidance of boredom.
Here, I must offer a word of advice before even beginning in the hopes that if you shoot into bouts of narcolepsy at my obtuse verbosity that at least you will have had the chance to heed my words of experience (although, I’m sure the weak have already fallen, as it were.) My advice is this: don’t bake out of boredom. Allow this knowledge to fall into the same category as, “don’t shop when you’re hungry,” and, “don’t wear briefs because it keeps your junk too warm and then you become infertile.” Let it sink in. Alright? We press on, then.
At this point in the story, a trite, childish dialogue ensues in which Daniella and I are fools.
“We have a cake mix we can make!”
“Yeah, let’s do that!”
Don’t.
“Squee! Let’s do it!”
Nope.
“I’ll race you up the stairs!”
Don’t do that.
“Yeah!”
I wish I had fallen and torn my pericardium.
So we got upstairs and the cake was unveiled. A lemon cake. Oh, the days of scrumptiousness this cake could dish out! It started off okay. Well, comparatively. The electric mixer had already been used. It had been used to mix something so gelatinous that nothing could be done to peel the viscous grime from the beaters. Nothing, that is, except for plugging it in, setting it to high and beating the hell out of a bowl of soapy water. Success.
And then, oh bucket, there wasn’t enough oil. Just one thing after another, isn’t it? A foot militia was assigned to its location. Alas, not a drop of the stuff in the kitchen. Grasping for alternatives, we briefly considered many combinations of the following items: margarine, shortening, Palmolive, petroleum, and the like. Luckily, at that very moment, logic occurred: there was oil, just not in a conventional form, perse. The oil we had selected was seated atop a throne of garlicky vinegar-and-feta decadence. What harm could come from substituting the oily crown of a salad dressing for olive oil? We were optimistic—blindly so, but nonetheless. Past Hlynka-Gordon hijinks, however, have suggested that garden-variety tasks such as baking and parking successfully are practically inconceivable.
Still, all was well as of yet. The batter was creamy. The pan awaited its greasing. When, what’s this? A gentle aroma tickled our nostrils. It was not that of the citrus delight we thought we were preparing. Almost out of panic, we decided to add some lemon zest. Some lemon. A lemon, an entire lemon. Wildly ripping the zest from the rind and vengefully juicing it, we covered the surface with cups and cups of lemon matter. It was a massacre.
Unfortunately, we had not considered the combination of ingredients that we had so haphazardly thrown into our concoction. We set out to bake a lemon cake. The Caesar Salad was a mistake.
After picking our wheezing, hysterical bodies up off the floor, having fallen there due to the jellying of legs after a heavy course of rabid laughter, we queried, “what’s the opposite of garlic?” in hopes that there was some savory antithesis to garlic that might counteract it’s overpowering presence in our cake. Sad to say, the opposite of Garlic is The Berlin Wall, but that would hardly help our situation. We attempted with all piety and finesse to deal the batter into a casserole dish. Nearly unsuccessful in that endeavor, things could only get better.
After 12 minutes of baking, the kitchen smelled like a pizza had done something very naughty in there. Of course, this was potentially a good sign; the theory was that if uncakelike things escaped, maybe a cake would remain. When at last the bell tolled, and the cake was extracted from it’s sepulchral furnace, an oven-shaped cube of garlic breath shot out of the thing like a cork, hitting us both squarely in our noses, and subsequently killing us. Whether out of disgust or sheer situational hilarity, it isn’t entirely understood.
Daniella’s parents, on the other hand, rather enjoyed it, though they disapproved of its being made in a casserole dish, which was odd considering the cake had many of the ingredients one might also find in a Lasagna.