Serena’s been wanting cake.
Let me back up. In about three months I’m going to have a lot less stuff and I figure that includes things like 4 cans of organic pumpkin and every kind of dried bean known to man and an astoundingly lot of saffron, something I use about once a year when I remember I have it. So I’m kind of on a mission to use up everything that I’ve hauled from one side of the continent, almost, to the other and then back again, especially since I figure that with moving and storage costs, those cans of organic pumpkin have cost me about $18 each and I am damned well going to use them.
And somewhere I found some boxes of cake mix that may have come from the Clinton Administration but that stuff never goes bad, I’m pretty sure.
And I also found a can of crushed pineapple, which sounds like what’s leftover at the pineapple-canning factory after they’re done stamping out all those identical round disks and sliding tubes of them into cans. But I can’t let anything go to waste and from some dim memory I pulled out something that used a box of cake mix, a can of crushed pineapple and a can of cherry pie filling.
Sounds awful, but I made the mistake of mentioning it to Serena and before I knew it I was in the cherry pie filling aisle noticing how many different types of cherry filling there are. Who knew?
So Serena, the new cook, mixed up the cake batter using the pineapple juice as the liquid and using melted butter instead of oil. This was looking pretty good. I was visualizing yellow cake with bits of fruit in it here and there.
Then she added the cherries, and by “cherries” I actually mean “glutinous wet purple mass with some darker wetter bits in it,” along with the pineapple sludge and we spread the whole thing in the cake pan and into the oven.
By that time I was pretty prepared for what came out but still held out hope.
But no, what we have is a dense, moist purple brick.
I keep making everybody’s pieces larger and larger in the hope that the purple mass of denseness will soon disappear before it spawns but it’s not going away.
April 4th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
my goal for over a yaer now has been to use up the food i, like an alzheimic hamster, have amassed, not on my hips, but in the garage.
the rats helped me do this once before but i didn’t learn my lesson then.
i, too, have safron… somewhere… and i don’t know what i meant to cook with it… and when it’s time to do so… i don’t remember that i have it… or where it is… or… did i say alzheimic?
)
serena’s cake reminds me a blue maple one i made in sixth grade. my mom starting me in on baking my own birthday cakes when i was very young and either because she convinced me i liked doing this or because i did like doing this, i did.
so one time i thought i’d try out the lesser-used brown bottles in the box of flavorings and color. the dusty ones. the ones marked BLUE and MAPLE.
and being myself, i decided that maple was so mysterious there should be much of it.
and the mystery is…
that i ate it all…
because it was pretty darned awful!
but i did like experimenting!
cyn
April 5th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
so how does it taste?
April 5th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Cyn: Blue maple? Bleh.
Logical: Um, sweet. And purpleish. Difficult to identify actual flavors.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:24 am
I love the bit about making everyone’s slice larger at each serving to try and rid the house of it… I just did that with a pan of what my 6 yr old called Nownies – they are brownies but we have to eat them now before they get hard… er. Thanks for the chuckle.