Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Not Quite Right

I don't cook. I reheat. - from Sibling Rivalry.

Aside from one disastrous attempt at gingerbread last year, I probably haven't baked anything in 25 years or more, unless you count spinach souffle from a little red box. So you know I must have been pretty desperate to do this tonight:




See, a co-worker's birthday was yesterday, and the office is celebrating it tomorrow. I promised to bring the cake. We know she likes lemon cake, because she's baked it before. But Safeway, Albertson's and Fry's don't have lemon cakes in their respective bakeries. So here I am, baking tonight, when I should be asleep. The cakes in the nine-inch pans should be cool by now. They're also rather lopsided. But I'll frost them as best I can, and then go to bed.


Hmm, this cake looks kind of bumpy.
Maybe Ma won't see it's lumpy.
I know it will be good to eat.


I never did figure out the title of the kid's book I'm quoting from above, but I still remember chunks of it, forty years later. Billy's Ma said she would "keep this cake forever," thus avoiding the ordeal of actually having to eat it. Of course, his cake was worse than mine. He put in 20 eggs, including the eggshells.


Maybe I'll buy a real cake in the morning. Even if it is chocolate.

(Update - I did buy a second cake - and promptly smooshed the icing when it fell over in the car. But Jan was amused with my efforts.)

******

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Show us a picture that didn't quite come out the way you wanted -- but is still interesting.


An attempt to photograph lightning. I like the odd pattern of lights over the rain-splattered car roof. It looks a bit like the surface and sky of an alien planet!


Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee (from the Alice in Wonderland dark ride at Disneyland) are appropriately psychedelic.


The blurry, underexposed quality of this shot helps to disguise the fact that it's of a still figure in the Grand Canyon tableau of the Disneyland Railroad.


"Nature is red in tooth and claw." These animatronic dinosaurs shouldn't be this dark or this red, but it adds to the drama.

That's enough. Good night!

Karen

P.S. See http://www.livejournal.com/users/mavarin/ for my long-winded answer to the latest Writer's Weekly Question.

2 comments:

DesLily said...

don't feel badly.. i remember when i dated my X, my mother tried to be nice and back a b'day cake..it said it was "lite and fluffy".. whell... with the first spoonful of icing the cake fell into a million pieces! At least your cake stayed together!

Becky said...

Isn't that funny! I used to ask for lemon cake for my birthday when I was a kid. My mother would bake the layers in heart shaped pans. :-)