L.R. Burt

Yesterday was Mr. Burt’s birthday. While he was sleeping in and LR was having her morning coffee, she ran through a mental checklist of everything she needed for the celebrations. Mainly the presents, only half of which had been shipped from Amazon. She didn’t have to worry about cooking birthday dinner, since the plan was to go out. Then it hit her:

A birthday cake had never crossed her mind.

And so she faced the dilemma: to bake a cake, or not to bake a cake? If she baked one, then Mr. Burt and she would have to eat the whole thing themselves. Of course, he could always take the leftovers to work. The other option, since his family tradition was to bake a white cake with vanilla frosting and then decorate it with colored icing and make it as tacky as possible, was to wait till Friday, when his parents were due to come in from out of state, and bake a traditional Burt Family Ugly Cake.

Should have gone with the latter. Instead, LR caved to an inner pressure to be a good wife and have a cake on her husband’s actual birthday. When Mr. Burt woke up, he opted for cupcakes, so LR drove to Albertsons for cake mix.

It was a quick trip. Ten minutes. Home again, and she set to mixing the cake.

Which was difficult, since she’d forgotten to buy eggs.

Another dilemma faced her: go back to the store for eggs, or pick some up while they were out later and make Mr. Burt’s cake a day late.

LR’s conscience, which hadn’t let her put it off five days, wouldn’t let her put it off one, either. She went back to the store and ten minutes later was home again with eggs.

But when it came time to pour the cake batter into the cupcake pan, she realized she didn’t have enough paper cupcake thingies to put in the cupcake pan. There were ten. A cake mix makes about two dozen cupcakes.

Not about to run up to the store again, LR ecided to make ten cupcakes and an 8-inch round cake. Mr. Burt was okay with that, and LR thought it would be kind of cute, a mommy cake with ten baby cakes around her. Like a flower or something.

So she baked the cupcakes and cake.

Except that she took a shortcut and didn’t grease and flour the cake pan. Instead, she sprayed it with non-stick cooking spray.

Which resulted in this:

Mr. Burt, wonderful husband that he was, insisted he didn’t care, and LR could just ice the broken pieces. Unfortunately, about half of the cake completely crumbled, so that meant the cake looked something like this:

The cupcakes turned out a bit flat, too:

And after all that, Mr. Burt and LR were too full from dinner at Chili’s to have any cake last night.

Who needs a perfect cake, anyway? LR would rather have a story.

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birthdays, kitchen catastrophes, silliness, there's no scope for the imagination in cookery