SunstoneBlog

Bill (my husband) woke up Sunday morning with a great idea for his Temple Prep SS class. He’d bake a cake. Not just any cake. This would be the world’s best white cake with chocolate icing. The four couples in our class had just met each other the prior Sunday, so after introductions, Bill had invited them to wax nostalgic about their favorite desserts. The conversation led quickly to teasing interaction, praising of each others’ culinary prowess, and promises of future sharing among people who had just been strangers moments ago. By the time Bill had turned the discussion to the plan of salvation, salivating had paved the way, and class members were openly expressive about the gift of the plan of happiness.

So this Sunday morning, as a postlude to the bishop’s anticipated 15-minute discussion of the temple interview questions, Bill wanted to serve one of those favorite desserts. Significantly, he passed on choosing any favorites of his own, and lit on cake. Every birthday Bill reminds me he wants pie – not cake – so I knew this would be a labor of love.

With sacrament meeting looming at 9:00 a.m., Bill jumped out of bed to get started. This was not going to be a mix cake. It would be his Mom’s special recipe. Having not seen the recipe in years, we were grateful it only took a few minutes to find. But the recipe was for a 9 by 9 pan and he needed to be able to serve it from a 9 by 13 pan. He doubled the recipe. And when he poured in the batter, I was in the shower. Naw, it didn’t look like too much batter for the pan to him. He popped it in the oven and set the timer.

When I stepped out of the shower, I knew something was wrong. We rushed to the kitchen to assess the damage our noses told us had befallen his creation. The cake itself looked shaken but OK, but the oven was rejecting dozens of dripped batter blobs by burning them crispy. Evasive action on the part of oven aluminum foil saved the smoke alarm from morning duty, but the open oven was no good for the cake. When it finally emerged to the ding of the bell, it was apparent the cake had lost the first round.

Bill stood in the kitchen, half-dressed, slapping the oven mitt against the counter in (non-swearing) dejection. Our 18-year old daughter, Melanie, (who would normally find an occasion of this sort the perfect opening for a belly laugh) was touched. “You should have seen his face,” she told me later, “I had no idea cake could be that important.” Several daughters quickly created a chocolate frosting they hoped would save Bill’s masterpiece. As we left for sacrament meeting, the white (canyon) cake was cooling, waiting for the magic chocolate touch.

Shortly after the rest hymn, Bill left sacrament meeting to do battle with the frosting and wrestle the cake into serving shape. He returned just before the closing song and didn’t say a word. During “Hope of Israel” I asked him how it went. He rolled his eyes, “I keep making bad decisions,” he said. I hardly dared ask. He had decided to put the cake on a beautiful serving dish, and to make it fit, he needed to cut it in half. Repositioning the halves promised to solve the fallen cake problem, because the short side of one half of the cake could be lined up with the tall side of the other half, and with chocolate frosting in the middle, surely the cake would be happy. Having never made a cake from scratch before, Bill was totally unprepared for the crumbly texture of real cake. But he quickly became acquainted with it as it came out of the pan and attached itself to every swipe of his chocolate knife. Even so, Bill had done everything he could think of doing for his cake (except for digging and dunging) and had then returned to sacrament meeting. After the closing prayer, Bill asked me to go home (two blocks away) and bring the cake to his class, which would be starting right away. Melanie jumped at the chance to help (or go home for a minute). At any rate, when we walked in the kitchen, neither of us was really prepared for what we saw.

In the movie The Hours, Julianne Moore’s character bakes a cake which turns out completely unsatisfactorily, and – if memory serves me right – disturbs her so much she destroys it and thereafter plans to commit suicide (for more reasons than the cake, one assumes). Julianne’s cake would have won all the prizes in a head-to-head competition with what Melanie and I found waiting on the counter at home. One look and I was overcome with mirth and horror. Never was a more forlorn concoction of sugar and flour imbued with so much hope, and never had one deserved it less. Cutting and repositioning the cake had not improved its lopsided presentation by one iota. And the chocolate frosting appeared very much like a brown ski slope descending atop a diorama of varying white geologic strata. The knife-scrape trails in the drying ski slope were a silent testimony of how hard Bill had tried to even things out and cover up the holes, but to no avail. I imagined my husband leaving the scene of this crime and coming back to the chapel, planning to simply ask me to go get this cake and bring it to class. There should have been yellow tape.

After recovering from the initial shock, Melanie and I knew we had to come to a meeting of the minds on our assignment. Bill had, in fact, asked us to bring the cake to the church right now, or at least within a few minutes. Point of more important fact, however, was that this cake could not, should not be served to any one, friend or foe. For some minutes we stood in the kitchen at a complete loss. The more we stood and looked at each other, the more we knew we could not return to the church empty-handed and crush Bill’s dream. But WHAT to do? And do it in five minutes? “Gee Mom, shopping on Sunday might be OK in this situation, should we just run to Wal-Mart and get a white cake?” For some reason, that galvanized me. Only one cup of powdered sugar left (so, we don’t have powdered sugar in our two years’ supply). I could whip up just enough fresh chocolate frosting to civilize the appearance of the top of the cake. A slice off the bottom here would do wonders for the steep slope, and now, do we have a carton of real whipping cream in the fridge? Please God, let there be fresh whipping cream in the fridge.

Within fifteen minutes, Melanie and I had transformed the cake. It stood somewhat shyly on its beautiful glass serving dish, fluffed out and flawless in its stiff whipping cream dress, with tiny little waves of chocolate frosting tripping merrily over the cake top. Melanie and I were pleased – and even a little proud as we carried the cake into the classroom. Bill’s eyes lit up like Christmas. He didn’t say the words, but we saw his eyes asking, “Is that my cake?” Then he recognized it, the same square boxy shape, the same lovely glass dish, the chocolate frosting. “You saved it,” he gushed. Bill served the cake to his class, delighted at the outcome of his offering. Everyone ate with compliments and I kid you not, one woman pronounced it the very best white cake she had ever eaten.

But that is not the point of my story!! This class had just finished a discussion about the temple interview questions, and worthiness issues hung in the air like striped laundry. So Bill asked a process question: what can we learn from this cake today? After taking a few (pretty good) answers, he launched into the story of the cake that had started out with so much hope and anticipation and had gone into the oven unprepared. This cake had lost parts of itself in the oven that burned to oblivion, and in the process of recovery, had collapsed, falling into itself. Then an attempt to cut and even it out had disfigured it further. To top it off (literally) the frosting that was supposed to help everything ended up ripping more parts away. Melanie and I were overcome with giggles at this point in the discussion, remembering the disaster on the counter, and everyone laughed with us as we squeaked out our kitchen horror story. Melanie even let me tell the part where she had exclaimed in dismay, “I hate it when I find out my parents suck at something!” The air in the room was light and sunny when Bill turned to the class and asked, “So do we have to be perfect to go to the temple?”

September 28th, 2006 | Category: Rotation, Sunstone | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL