Waiting for the Cake to Fall

There are birthday celebrations afoot.  In preparation, I have baked a celebratory confection.  It is not a cake, in the traditional sense.  Rather, it is a batch of chocolate chip cookies fitted into a cake pan.  There are strong camps in our household when it comes to birthday treats.  There are those who extoll the virtues of the “cookie cake” and there are adherents to the “peanut butter cake” (a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and covered in chopped up peanut butter cups).  But, though their feelings are deep, both sides are willing to set aside their ideological differences when it comes time to celebrate their family members by eating sweets.

I walk by the cake stand in the kitchen, which now houses an inverted Bundt pan, well cooled from the oven.  I jiggle the pan a bit to see if the recalcitrant contents have made any progress.  They have not.  The pan glides easily over the surface of the cake stand, as the cake is still stubbornly glued to the pan.

I head to the laundry room, where I need to get the towels from the washer to the dryer.  I check my watch.  Is there time before everyone gets home to do a bit of wrapping?  I don’t think so.  It will have to wait until Monday now, as the house will be full for the weekend and I don’t want to risk exposing my various unwrapped present hiding places.  Besides, I love watching them walk in the door to find presents suddenly peeking out beneath the boughs of the tree.  I don’t want to give up that joy by furtively adding a presenting here and a present there.  I suppose there is something in me that relishes a big reveal.

The new lights for the Christmas tree arrived this morning.  I’d really like to get them on the tree before the kids return from school.  (Again, craving the moment when they walk in the door to a lit tree).  I open the box, which has a message stamped on the outside, urging me to test my lights right away so the company will have time to make right any problems before my holiday celebrations.  I plug the long string into the socket, unleashing a festive twinkle on the room.  Within moments, the lights are in an intractable snarl.  I plop myself on the floor, resigning myself to do battle with this formidable adversary.

Several Christmas carols later, I have subdued the lights into a tight, tangle-free ball.  But, I don’t know if I have the fortitude remaining to face the inevitable needle pricks and sap that will encrust the crevices between every finger once I begin stringing the lights on the tree.  As as stalling technique, I leave the tree bare and walk through the kitchen again and give the cake pan the familiar jiggle.  This time there is resistance.  The cake has ceded its struggle against gravity.  

I pull off the pan, an olive green Bundt pan imprinted with the words “Bundt Pan” and “Northland Aluminum Products, Inc.”.  It is the same pan my mother baked our Bundt cakes when I was growing up.  Its dip-dyed chipping olive paint betrays its age.  This is a green that tethers it to the seventies more surely than any carbon dating method.  

Bundt cakes felt decadent and so very refined in those growing up years of mine.  A Bundt cake had to be capitalized and trademarked.  It was no mere layered cake of the people.  It was surely the mark of elite means to be able to create a Bundt cake.  I’m sure that’s why, when my mother mentioned she was de-cluttering and the pan would not be making the cut, I immediately offered to take it in.

I don’t think it has the same sofisticated allure for my children that it held for my chidhood self.  To them, it is simply the pan that makes the “donut cakes” (named for their shape, not contents).  I think this started when they were young, as a way to differentiate between this lumpy cake and the flat varieties.  Somehow, it stuck, as these things tend to.  To this day, they still request a donut or layered cake, depending on their varying preferences. 

Once the pan is removed, I am instantly relieved.  A bit of cookie dough clings to the upturned pan.  And, in its absence I can see that the innards of the cake are still goo.  No worries.  It’s vegan cookie dough— quite edible raw.  And, the obstinate pieces can easily be removed, the damage artfully hidden beneath the frosting.

But, it is in the act of thus reconstructing the cake that I realize that my relief was premature.  The perimeters of the cake are on a persistent outward journey that has brought them to the edges of the cake stand.  It would appear that gravity would, indeed have the last say with the cake.  

In culinary ninja mode, I leap into action.  I grab alternating edges of the oozing heap, coaxing the cake into a smaller circumphrance.  I am instantly covered in chocolate, as I try to alternate between sides of the cake, in a futile attempt to be in all places at once.  With a resigned glance at my shirt, I recruit my midsection as a third appendage, prodding the cake between my stomach and my hands.  With chocolate hands, I leave the cake momentarily in the clutches of gravity in order to grab the pan.  In a swift move, I try to coerce it over the expanding mass.  The dough protrudes in stubborn globs beneath the sides.  I tuck and shove until the pan very nearly meets the cake stand again.  I walk away, hoping it will act as some sort of jello mold, in which the cake may congeal into some sort of stability.

I would like to chalk this whole episode up to the vicisitudes of learning a new oven.  But, the truth is, this is story that has been repeated so often, it is almost a running gag.  There is just something about the cookie cake that makes it terribly prone to culinary mishaps.  I’m sure no one will be surprised to find the sorry state of the cake when they return.  

Luckily, many years of my baking has taught my family to prize the taste of the food over the aesthetics.  In our household, even such celebratory items as birthday cakes are forgiven a multitude of sins.

I am comforted by this fact.  And, by my deep assurance that it will still be delicious.  I licked the misshapen detritus from my hands after my harrowing save.