A Culinary Experience

Baking is something that I love to do after a stressful week. With three midterm exams behind me, I decided to kick back by baking last night. I’d suggest this kind of test relief for anyone in college who enjoys being in the kitchen. I was baking for a friend, and his request was simple—a two layered chocolate cake with white icing.

It sounded simple anyway.

I began with a Hershey’s chocolate cake recipe. Mixing together the flour, sugar and cocoa with the wet ingredients created a smooth dark batter that drifted back and forth like tiny ocean waves, making delicate bubbles inside my plastic bowl. They crackled.

I poured the thin, brown batter into a cake pan that I covered with a generous layer of butter and flour. It flowed quickly, hitting the center and rushing to the sides. As I pulled the bowl away from the pan, small spots of batter dropped to the counter. I felt like a child picking up stray pennies in the sunlight. I got every last one.

After the cake was done baking, I placed it on the counter to cool. But chocolate makes me impatient. I flipped the pan over on to a plate, thinking that it would slide out with ease (because that is what happens on all those cooking shows that I watch.) I pulled the pan away to find nothing there but the emptiness of my clean, white plate. My cake was stuck.

Now what? I ran a knife around the edge and tried the flip again. Still nothing. I stood there alone in my kitchen and got extremely frustrated--frustrated with our broken can opener, flimsy used steak knives and our extremely mismatched plates that were always dirty no matter how hard we cleaned them.

But I was being a baby. I’m in college. If there is ever a time to enjoy the broken, borrowed and dirty, it’s now. I like that doing laundry requires a scavenger hunt for quarters, making me dive between couch cushions and under beds. I like that homemade popcorn isn’t ruined by the loud and constant beep of a very sensitive smoke alarm. I like eating from slightly dirty plates, just because I can.

So I took a spatula and scooped instead of flipped. It was in pieces, but much like my life in college, I held it together with a little laughter and a lot of icing.