Tag Archives: mistakes

You Gotta Break a Few Eggs

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My nemesis

My nemesis

It’s time for my annual humiliation–the night I attempt to bake a simple cream cheese pound cake for the big cake auction: The Thrilla In Vanilla. How hard could it be, you know? It only has six ingredients and a couple of steps. Courtney is making TWO cakes with ganache, chocolate mousse, chocolate curls. Jo has concocted a key lime cake and her famous burnt sugar caramel while also coaching softball. Anna just dropped off three loaves of challah, kosher for Rosh Hashannah.

And I’m giving myself a pep talk.

One year, I pulled the cake pan out of the oven and turned it upside down on the cooling rack. As I gently pulled the pan away from the cake, the entire golden crust stuck to the inside of the pan.

Dammit.

The instructions HAD mentioned that I should butter the pan, but I didn’t think a recipe that contained THREE STICKS of butter needed a buttered pan. I scraped the crispy crust from the pan with a spoon and contemplated just how wrong that idea had been.

The next year, I attempted to make this same cake. I buttered the tube pan then I buttered it again. Mixed up the ingredients exactly then baked it at 275 for two hours. I had gotten a late start so the cake wasn’t finished until after 11 p.m. I was about 27 months pregnant with Carlos that year and was out of my mind with fatigue. After I pulled the cake out of the oven, I thought about how my Grandmama Irene would let her tube pan cool on the neck of a bottle. I fetched an old bottle and set it on the kitchen counter. Verrrrry carefully, I turned the entire cake pan upside down and suspended it over the bottle.

In the 4 seconds that it took me to remember that upside down cooling was for angel food cakes so they didn’t collapse it was too late to save the pound cake.

Hanging upside down is definitely not for hot pound cakes.

In slow motion, I watched the pound cake slllliiiidde out of that heavily buttered pan and smash into a thousand nuggets on the countertop.

This was before cake pops, so there was no saving it. And since it was almost midnight and I was super pregnant, I stood there in the half-dark kitchen and ate my fill of shattered cake.

My favorite travesty with this cake happened the very first time I made it, back when Fartbuster and I were married. The recipe is from a family cookbook that Brett put together many years ago. I followed the recipe exactly. I’ll give you a second to put on your reading glasses and look up there at the recipe.  Does anything strike you as odd? I was new to baking, so I added just what the recipe called for–18 oz of cream cheese. Two solid blocks and a little bit of a third. Over a POUND of cream cheese. My poor little hand mixer was smoking by the time I got it blended together.

The cake smelled divine while it baked. I lifted it from the oven and inverted it onto a plate. I let it cool for a few hours and we grew giddy with anticipation at tasting my first homemade cake. When it was time for the tasting, the knife sliced through the crumbly golden crust but then it…got stuck. Like it had hit a dense core.

I pulled the knife out and tried again, with more of a sawing motion. We finally got a slice cut after a little effort. The center of that cake had so much congealed cream cheese in it that it was GRAY. It was a lot like eating PlayDoh, only not as salty.

A few weeks later, when I mentioned at a family dinner that I had made that cake, Big Gay said, “You know there’s a typo in the recipe, right? It’s supposed to be 8 ounces of cream cheese.”

I simply nodded and said, “Yeah, I figured that out.”

Like so much of life, every time I mess up this cake I learn something new. Let’s hope I get a little bit better with every try and ONE DAY…one sweet sweet day…I will get it right!

If you’re close to Athens, come by the Prince One Lobby at ARMC on Friday, Sept 19 from 8 a.m.-noon. We’ll be selling goodies and auctioning cakes for the Leukemia/Lymphoma Society!

A Ritual for the New Year

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burn the past

I’ve grown up with many traditions related to welcoming in the new year.  It’s best to eat black eyed peas and turnip greens for money and luck.  I wouldn’t think of doing laundry on New Year’s Day so I don’t wash someone out of my life.  Same with sweeping–can’t be done on that day.  I like to kiss someone on New Year’s Eve at midnight, because whatever you’re doing at that moment is what you’ll be doing the rest of the year.

A few years ago, I started my own ritual for New Year’s Eve. It’s a tangible, visible way to leave the past in the past and draw a clear line between the past and the future, right at that moment when we mark the start of a new year.

In the evening, I gather a stack of paper and a nice pen.  On each slip of paper, I write one thing that I want to say goodbye to from the old year.  Maybe a fear, a regret, a mistake, a poisonous relationship or a bad habit.  Write it out, fold it up, and stack it in a pile.

Once I’ve made my stack of farewells, I start a nice fire in the fireplace and pour a hot toddy.  When the fire is going and my insides are glowing, I throw the whole pile into the flames and watch it go up.  GOODBYE.

Call it corny if you will, but I feel some sense of empowerment from doing this ritual.  Just as gratitude becomes more concrete when I write it down, the separation from the negative things in my life becomes more concrete when I watch them turn from paper to ash.  When the negative stuff is burned up, THEN I’m ready to write out my resolutions!

The first year I did this ritual, I kept a special paper box on my dresser and slipped notes into it over a matter of months.  Didn’t have a fireplace that year, so I burned it all up on a cookie sheet on the deck–that was a little worrisome!  But it felt good.

The next year, Fartbuster and I did the ritual together.  We sat before the fireplace making out our slips.  At one point, he looked up and said, “Are we going to read these out loud?”  I assured him that we weren’t going to share them.  He scribbled something and folded it up tight.  I’m pretty sure it was the affair that he wrote on that slip.  Well, THAT didn’t go as expected!

hot-chocolateThe year Richard was in the hospital, I had been up to be with him for Christmas, so I was home alone for New Year’s Eve.  Being alone stunk.  New Year’s Eve had been our adventure time.  The previous three years, we had celebrated the new year in Delft, Munich, and Bermuda.  So yeah…pppffffffft.  That first slip was easy to write:  CANCER.  After that, I had a hard time.  It had been a horrible year, but I still had hope.  I still believed that if we could just get rid of that stupid leukemia, everything else would be great.  So I threw cancer on the fire and drank my hot chocolate with Bailey’s.  And I cried until I felt a little better.  

Rituals aren’t magic.  They only carry the power that we invest in them.  This one feels good.  If you’ve got some things you want to say goodbye to in 2013, give it a try!  

Old Lady Old Lady Old Lady!!!

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crosswalk womanI’ve been thinking a lot lately about mistakes and the way I punish myself for making them.  And of course it reminds me of a story…

When Richard and I were dating, he lived for a time in Baltimore while I was still in Georgia.  We traveled every other weekend to see each other.  One weekend, I flew to Baltimore to spend four days with him.  On Monday morning, he had a class to teach so the plan was for me to drive him to campus, drop him off, then spend some time exploring the city.  I was off-kilter and unfamiliar with everything that morning–his car, getting out of the garage, the neighborhood, the one-way streets around campus.  I was dependent on him and having to listen for instructions.  Following blindly.

Even more so, I was unfamiliar with the greater situation–being a divorcee who finds herself in love with a man who then moves to another state but wants to stay together.  That weekend felt like me trying out his life in Baltimore.  Friday night faculty party, Saturday exploring the Inner Harbor, Sunday lunch with his family.  The day before, Richard had driven into a lush old neighborhood of wide green streets and tall homes to show me a house he was thinking of buying.  A house that was way too big for just him.  I can’t remember much about it, other than it was more beautiful than any house I had ever imagined living in.  It was across the street from a house with a sunroom filled with yellow, green and blue parakeets and gray cockatiels.  I imagined walking my dachshunds past that aviary every day.  I remember that.  And I remember how he said, “I wanted to know what you thought about it.  If you liked it.”

So I was shaky and it was Monday and I had a lot on my mind.  We were about a block from his building when he told me to turn left.  I waited for the light to change and for a flock of students to cross, then I began to turn.

He blurted, “OldladyOldladyOLDLADY!” and stomped his foot to the floor to pound the imaginary brake.  I thought he was having a stroke so I turned full on to face him and ask what the hell he was going on about.  As I kept turning.  He shouted, “STOP!” and that’s when I saw the old woman making her way across the crosswalk.  I slammed on the brakes.  She was about halfway across and the light had already changed on her.  I was still a good ten yards away, but she gave me the stink eye anyway and finished her trek.  Cars were honking at me from all directions.

I was so rattled that I had to pull over.  Richard wasn’t saying anything, just blowing a big breath out very slowly.  I burst into tears and sank into the steering wheel.  

“It’s OK.  It’s OK,” he said as I had a snot-slinging fit right there on the side of the road.  “I tried to tell you to stop.”

“No!  You kept saying ‘old lady old lady old lady!'”  If you want me to stop, you say “STOP!” I wailed.

“OK.  It’s OK.”

“I can’t believe I made a stupid mistake like that!”

And that’s when he LAUGHED.  “You didn’t make a mistake!  HITTING HER would have been a mistake.  You may not have seen her but you stopped in time.  You AVOIDED a mistake.  Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

crosswalkStill.  I couldn’t shake it.  That was 11 years ago and I can still see that woman in her tweed coat and it makes my chest tighten up to think how close I came to hurting her.  Eleven years, and I’m still stuck in that intersection because I almost made a mistake.

Do you ever do that–carry guilt from things you ALMOST did wrong?  That was one of the biggest differences between Richard and me.  I was so worried about doing anything wrong or hurting anyone or making a nuisance of myself that I spent most of my energy worrying over what to do and then worrying over what I did.  Being grown up is scary.  Being in charge of things like a car or a life or my own heart–that was all so overwhelming on that Monday morning.  He was more of a “well, let’s make the best choice then see how it works out–no harm, no foul” kind of guy.

Sometimes when I find myself wallowing in “oh, I can’t believe you almost did that,” I say, “Old lady old lady old lady” and move on!