Amateur Hour

It's been a busy time, folks. Busy enough that I forgot my vow to try to post something every two weeks or so. I took a two week trip around the holidays, so that was excuse #1. Then my day job got a lot busier, so that was excuse #2. There are excuses #3 and #4 too, but the truth of it is that when I wasn't busy, I was just lazy.

And have you ever noticed that when it rains, it pours? I went from having relatively few engagements and obligations to having far too many in a short period of time.

My church set up a committee meeting on Wednesday. No big deal. Then Sean asked me to make a cake for someone that he works with who's retiring, for a meeting on Thursday. Ok, tricky with the church meeting and work, but workable. Then my writer's group meeting (which is always scheduled on the same day every month but which I somehow forgot about) was scheduled for Tuesday night. Ok, starting to get into overload mode here.

And then one of Sean's teammates contacted me on the down-low, because a bunch of executives were going to be in town and they wanted to throw a little surprise bash to celebrate Sean's recent promotion--and they wanted cake. So when they came to the teammate and asked him what kind of cake Sean likes, he asked, "Why don't we just have his wife do it?"

Why not indeed. So I told this plucky teammate that if I could get the day off of work for my regular job, I would be happy to bake cupcakes for 115 people. I got the day off. Sean had no idea.

So I'm booked enough now that I know I need to be careful. I need to be smart. I have a grandiose plan for the retirement cake. It will be stacked, round bottom, square top, chocolate bark on the edges. I figure I'll make the chocolate bark on Monday, not worry about it on Tuesday, and bake the cake on my lunch break and stack and frost it after the church meeting on Wednesday. Then Thursday I'd bake my little tootsies off in the morning and have all the surprise cupcakes delivered by 3:30. Easy-peasy, right?

Well, Monday and the chocolate bark went exactly according to plan. Check.

Tuesday night, I'm leave my writer's group meeting at 8:45 and call my husband. He sounds antsy.

"Is something wrong?" I ask.

"Uuuh, well, maybe. I think I might have made a mistake," he replies.

"A mistake? What mistake?"

"What day did I tell you I needed that cake for?"

Long pause.

".........Thursday. Why?" I ask, squinting my eyes in a "oh, HELL no" look that he can't see over the phone, but I know he can feel. And my voice sounds dangerously icy, even to my own ears.

"Well, um..."

"You need it for tomorrow, don't you?"

"Yeah, I told you the wrong day. But I can just buy something."

"No," I say. "No, it's ok. I promise I'm not upset, or angry. I'll throw something together when I get home. I'll just have to use cake mixes. Will you pull out 8 eggs and three sticks of butter?"

I wasn't as efficient as I could have been when I got home, I admit it. But I took out a vanilla cake mix and a chocolate cake mix, and tweaked them with some added ingredients and substitutions (coffee instead of water in the chocolate cake, for instance), and popped them in the oven to bake. Then I made some coffee buttercream frosting and pulled out my damask cardboard cake rounds and my cake carrier, pulled the cakes out of the oven.... and waited.

And waited.

Even in the fridge, waiting for cake to cool enough before you can frost it is mind-numbingly slow when you're on a timetable and would much rather be in bed. Soon enough the time passed, and I gave both layers a sloppy "homestyle" icing. I broke up the chocolate bark by hand and layered it on the sides of each tier as quickly as I was able. I placed three pieces on top as kind of an artistic statement.

I stepped back.... and I hated it.

"Ugh," I said.

"It looks good," Sean said. "What's the matter?"

"I had much bigger plans," I said. "This just looks like amateur hour to me. I should have done it better! I should have taken more time. The top layer should be smaller. The chocolate should be on better. The icing should be smooth."

"I think it looks fine," Sean said.

"You mean that?" I asked. "It won't bother me if you'd rather go buy something more professional. I'm not going to spend any time trying to fix it."

"I promise," he said. "This is going to be way tastier than something I'd buy at Price Chopper, and it looks better, too. You worry too much."

So, too tired to care, I took a few lousy photos on my phone and boxed it up for transport the next day.

Sean came home and told me that everyone loved the cake--the same team member that recruited me for the cupcake extravaganza on Thursday even sent me a text message to tell me it was awesome. And the guy who was retiring--who was actually a client--sent an email the next day telling the team that he'd miss them and that their best asset was "Sean's wife's baking ability."

And what really cracked me up? People were asking Sean what the flavor was on the cake, because it was just so tasty. Sean, who knew perfectly well that it came out of a red and yellow box with a few tweaks, just gave a little laugh and a shrug and said,

"Well, I know there's something special in there, but I'm not quite sure what it is."

Bless that man.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of the 150 mini cupcakes I made (Mocha, Classic Vanilla, and Red Velvet). Really, once you've seen a few mini cupcakes, you've just about seen them all. But I do have to say--the red velvet ones looked quite smashing with their triangles of stripey chocolate bark. Waste not, want not, my friends.

And Sean never had a clue, until he saw my pink bakery boxes on the table and his team announced that I brought the cupcakes.

He called me afterwards.

"So, did you enjoy your day off?" he asked.

"Why yes. Yes, I did."