The Edible Cake and Hallway Skating

I was minding my own business, getting a lecture from my grandpa about volume control while lurking through the house when I got a fabulous idea.  I decided to create an edible cake for him.  I announced this to change the subject but he still wanted to discuss my “storming around” the house.  In my defense I wasn’t storming at all.  I was galloping to gain momentum to slide across the wood floor like a professional hockey player.  With enough momentum I can get all the way down the hallway if the rug or wall doesn’t get in my way.  One time while I was sliding down the hall Makayla barged through the front door and I was sliding at such a high speed that as she flung the door open, I slid right into it and fell backwards.  Last night I went to slide down the hallway but I forgot I wasn’t wearing socks and just kind of skidded until I fell down into a weird belly flop in the middle of the floor.  Makayla looked out from her room and looked at me and said, “Are you trying to do the worm again?”  I was pretty embarrassed about that and told her I was “stretching.”  She believed me.  Why I just so happened to be stretching in the hallway, on the floor, sprawled on my belly must not have been suspicious to her. 

Anyway, I told my grandfather perhaps my volume was not my problem but his since he’s got oddly large ears and he told me he was hearing impaired and I conceded that ear size has nothing to do with ability to hear, I suppose unless you were born without ears, and agreed to be quieter when sliding down the hallway.  After dinner I created my cake.  At first I was going to make it from scratch but was pretty much forbidden to do so since my grandma was thoughtful enough to buy me those easy little box cakes.  Apparently she doesn’t want me blowing up, imploding, igniting, or creating un-oven friendly things in her oven.  My grandfather voiced amazement that I was even allowed in the kitchen and I chose to be the bigger person and ignore his comment.  Since the lame box cake was ridiculously simple to make it turned out to be edible.  After I iced it I hollered to Grandpa three times, “Would you like a piece of this cake?”  He didn’t answer.  I sent each child to ask and he didn’t answer.  Grandma asked and he didn’t answer.  Grandma finally said, “He’ll have his later.”  Fair enough.  Makayla announced, while eating her cake, “Mommy finally made a normal cake!”  My grandmother thought this was funny.  After my children were done eating their cake my grandpa went into the kitchen, peered down at the cake and said, “What’s this?”

“That’s an edible cake that I created,” I said, “Y’all all laughed at me.  And now look.”

“No one offered me a piece,” he said, basically pouting.

I rolled my eyes at him, “We all four asked you if you wanted a piece.”

“I figured you wanted it with ice cream anyway,” Grandma said.

“Like we haven’t learned his odd habits in the entirety of our acquaintance with him,” I said to grandma, then to him, “We’ve known you for a year or two.  You eat your cake with ice cream.”

“Didn’t no one offer me a piece,” he said, just to be annoying, “I’m hearing impaired.”

“You hear just fine when I’m walking quiet like an Indian down the hallway,” I said, “but I offer you a piece of your favorite dessert three times, have two children and your wife offer you some cake, and you claim to have never heard these offerings.  How odd.”

He mocked my “Indian walking” and said my galloping down the hall made grandma bounce in her chair.  He demonstrated what said bouncing looked like and appeared to be having a demon exorcised.  I don’t gallop that damn hard.  I ignored his performance and thought about the horrible cake episode in “The Help,” and decided against making such a comment.  That would have just been in bad taste.

Sticker Patches and Humans are a Bad Combination

Grandma and Grandpa announced that they were going to town to “Wally World” and I decided to take that opportunity to brush their dog, Jake, since he’s starting to resemble a giant ball of fluff with two little eyes. 

“Want to see the way I do it?” Grandpa asked.

Since I know how to brush a dog I really didn’t care to see a demonstration but sometimes Grandpa has new tricks so I said, “Sure.”
We went to the back porch and he proceeded to pick at Jake’s fur so that the part that was shedding just came right out.  Then he stuck the hair he had removed on my shirt.  I thanked him and got to work with the actual comb.  Within ten minutes I was bored with the task and realized it would take at least an hour.  Since the sun was burning on my face and the breeze was perfect, I decided I’d rather spend an hour lurking through the wilderness and figured I could brush Jake later.  There’s a creek close to my grandpa’s farm, with hills and caves and all sorts of cool stuff and I spent a great deal of my childhood tromping all over acres and acres of brush land.  I also spent a great deal of my teenage years sneaking off to the same places to smoke cigarettes and drink beer and skinny dip with my friends.  But today, I decided I would take my son to some of the calmer parts of the creek and show him some of my favorite spots.  Since the creek is a pretty good way from the farm, I took Jake with me and decided Taylor Swift would enjoy exploring. 

          We left the farm and started down the dirt road that leads to the creek.  Jake always stays off to the side of us or directly in front of us and most of the time if I stop he won’t go another step until I start moving again.  Caleb didn’t like that he wasn’t right with us and I explained that that was Jake’s way of protecting us and Jake was just keeping an eye on what was around us.  Taylor Swift stopped literally every five minutes with stickers in her paws.  I hadn’t considered that her feet weren’t tough like Jakes yet.  I ended up just carrying her the majority of the time.  We left the dirt road down a path I knew wouldn’t have too many thorny trees, yucca plants, cacti, and patches of stickers.  Caleb and I climbed a big hill that’s right above the creek and as we looked at rolling hills and the creek and endless land, Caleb said, “Mommy, this is where God lives.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I just do,” he said.

We made our way down the hill to the creek.  I showed him lily pads and found him a bird nest.  I showed him plants that rattle and a tree with branches you can swing on.  We played for about an hour by the creek and I told Caleb to stay put while I climbed to the top of a mound of rocks to see if I could find Jake.  I climbed to the top and whistled for him.  A few minutes later he came out from another part of the trees and I told him to stay close.  I was climbing down from the rocks back into the ravine and noticed my son and Taylor were trying to make their way over to me.

“Wait!” I hollered as I made my way down the rocky hill.  There were sticker patches and thorns and I didn’t want Caleb roaming without me or Jake right there since he would probably try to hug a snake or rabid armadillo or something.  I scrambled down and misjudged how steep the hill was and one minute I was on my feet and the next I was sliding down on my back.  Not only did my decent put thousands of thorns in my shirt, when I stopped sliding down, I rolled over onto my stomach right into a sticker patch.  I stood up awkwardly and heard Caleb yelling.  I figured he was yelling because my graceful decent from the hill scared him but I soon found he and Taylor were both stuck in their own sticker patch.  He was standing there with stickers stuck to his superhero costume and Taylor was whining.  With my arms spread I waddled over to him and realized I wouldn’t be able to rescue them with stickers all in my shirt.  The slightest movement made the stickers poke me and tear my skin and after trying to brush them off only to get them caught deeper, I decided the only thing to do was take my shirt off.  I took it off carefully and threw it on the ground and rescued my son and pup.  Taylor Swifts paws were bleeding and Caleb had literally hundreds of stickers all over his pant legs.  I sat down in the dirt, not the sticker patch, in jeans and a bra, and got to work getting the stickers off of him.  Then I got to work on my own shirt but there were so many little thorns from when I rolled over tumbleweeds and apparently even a cactus, that it was hopeless without tweezers.  So I picked up my dog, grabbed my son’s hand, and started walking home.  In my bra.  I was hoping with my whole heart that my grandparents would not be home yet and thirty minutes later, when I arrived at the farm, saw that they were home.  I covered my front, rushed in the front door, and said, “Don’t ask,” when they both looked up at me.  Grandma went back to her puzzle book without a word and Grandpa went back to his computer without a word.  They’re used to me.  I was relieved some cowboy or oil people didn’t come across the crazy lady without a shirt on, lurking through random brush land holding a puppy and a little boy in a superhero costume.  I think some would find a site like that odd.

Don't You Wish Your Girlfriend Could Bake Like Me

So I was minding my own business, cleaning Taylor Swift’s poop from my grandma’s porch in the freezing cold weather when I got what some would call a “wild hair up my butt” and decided to make enchiladas.  Typically my culinary skills are more humorous than productive but enchiladas I can do.  After dry heaving from my task, I went back inside and announced my plans.  Grandma and I checked the freezer and discovered I would need to go out to the well house to fetch some hamburger meat.  My grandma and grandpa are never short on beef since they butcher their own cows, one of the reasons I no longer allow myself to get emotionally close to livestock.  It’s difficult when they’re babies because they aren’t hideous yet but as they get older, uglier, and more annoying, establishing emotional boundaries is much easier.  Anyway, I went out to the well house to fetch a pound of beef and inspected what else they had in their stock freezer.  There were bags upon bags of chocolate chips.  I resisted the urge to open a bag and inhale the contents and ran inside to announce that I would be making chocolate chip cookies.  Halfway to the house I realized I forgot the hamburger and had to go back and get it.  I announced my plans upon entering through the back door, while also announcing I had stepped in either dog or cow shit which was impossible to see because of the snow.  My grandma looked slightly annoyed, either from the poop or my eager plan to bake or both.  It is well known that 97% of the time my baking results in an explosion or dry heaves.  I have even turned substances appropriate for human consumption into poison.  It felt like poison anyway.  The last time I baked Makayla said, “You’re like a chef on the cooking show only you’re the one who gets yelled at.”   I made dinner, washed dishes, and got to work on my cookies.  Grandma had already gotten all of my supplies ready since I have a bad habit of just starting my baking project and finding out halfway through that I’m missing important things that I need.  That’s when I improvise.  Out of flour?  Corn meal is like flour.  Out of vanilla?  Try whiskey.  Grandma went to the living room to her chair, a good spot since she could keep an eye on what I was doing from there.  The first instruction was to place two sticks of softened butter in the bowel.  Grandma had already asked if I wanted plastic or glass and I assured her plastic was a much more appropriate item for me to handle.  Especially since she likes her glass bowels and I have a habit of breaking things.  I held up the two sticks of butter so she could see and said, “It says these need to be soft.  Are these already-“  I cut myself short as my stealth grip sent butter oozing between my fingers and it exploded out of the paper.

“Well shit.  It begins,” I said.

“What?” Grandma asked.

“It’s fine!” I hollered back, “Everything is under control.”

Next the recipe called for ¼ cup of sugar.  Naturally I dumped a cup of sugar into the bowel because I thought it had said one and one fourths cup.

“Crap!” I yelled, “It’s ruined already.”

I explained my mistake and went to dump some sugar in the sink.  Grandma hollered at me not to do that and to just not put as much brown sugar in.  Duh.  She also instructed me not to get shells in the batter.  She told me not to splatter batter everywhere with the mixer.  I mixed the ingredients together and asked her if it was fluffy enough since the recipe instructed me to mix until fluffy.  She assured me it was.  The second step was flour, vanilla pudding mix, baking soda, and chocolate chips. 

“I forgot the eggs!” I screeched.

“No you didn’t,” Grandma said, “I watched you put them in.”

Ok.  Good.

Since the recipe called for instant vanilla pudding, I went about making the pudding.

“Just the mix Jess,” Grandma said, seeing me contemplating the box of pudding to figure out how to make it.

“Oh!” I said, “That’s much easier.”

I dumped the mix and flour and chips in the bowel.  I started mixing and remembered the baking soda.  Then I went on mixing and was very alarmed at what was happening.  The dough was forming one large ball all around the mixer.

“Ummmm,” I said, “This is odd.”

I continued mixing and the ball got bigger and bigger until all the dough was just a big ball around the mixing blades.  I was about to put the mixer on full blast so it would spray it all off and figured I’d catch as much as possible in the bowel but grandma came in to assist me and laughed at my dough ball.

“I have never seen someone blend like that!” she said, claiming I nearly made her pee her pants.  Apparently I was supposed to put the flour and stuff in a different bowel and slowly blend it in with the fluffy stuff.  We scraped the batter off back into the bowel and I mixed it with a spatula.  Then I spooned drops of dough onto a cookie sheet.  My grandmother studied my dough balls and told me to make them a little smaller.  I told her I’ve always been a fan of bigger balls.  Once the dough balls were in the oven my grandma turned on the oven light and I sat in front of the oven to watch them cook.  “They aren’t cooking!” I informed my grandmother.  She shooed me out and told me to come get them out when the timer went off.  When it did, I flew into the kitchen and pulled my cookies out.  We put them on paper to cool and Grandma took a bite out of one.  She claimed it was good while offering me a bite.  I searched her face for signs of deception or distress.  She showed signs of neither.  I took a bite and the cookie was actually good.  I finally baked something edible.  Not only edible but enjoyable.  I have pictures for proof.