The next morning was as gray and soggy as a soaked sock. I had to shove Bear’s butt to get her to go through the doggy door to do her business because the thunder made her nervous.
One of Dad’s Sticky Notes was on the cabinet: DON’T FORGET LUNCH. But I discovered his brown bag in the fridge when I went to get some juice. The kitchen lights were on, too. (Mom must have left before Dad did.) I turned the lights off. I love when the house feels all dark and cozy. Especially in summer.
I curled up on the couch and put in a DVD of the first season of Sweet Caroline Cakes. After finding out Madison was in my taekwondo class, I needed some cheering up.
After a few shows, I decided to dig out the cake-decorating book I got at the beginning of May, when Tony and I were doing our project. I was thinking about getting Tony a copy for his birthday in August. I figured the two of us would work things out before then. Not that we were going to hang out constantly or anything once we got to sixth grade. He was a guy after all, and I knew it didn’t work that way in middle school. But as long as we were friends, maybe things would be okay.
I stretched out on the living-room floor and flipped through the thick spiral book. There was a whole section on wedding cakes and another on birthday cakes, but my favorite section was the one on novelty cakes. I studied each page, trying to figure out how the bakers did it. One cake looked like a giant hamburger with a sesame bun and a side order of fries. Another one was shaped like a toilet! There was even one that looked like a newspaper sitting on grass. That one had a picture and writing you could really read. It said: BUSINESS NEWS OF THE WEEK: DAVE RETIRES.
The book said every great baker should know how to make fondant, so I decided to give it a shot. Fondant was the smooth doughlike frosting Sweet Caroline used all the time. She draped it on her cakes or cut all kinds of designs and ribbons out of it. When we were doing our project, Tony and I had helped one of the decorators at his parents’ shop make fondant. Big Frankie threw the ingredients into a mixer that was as tall as my waist. When I accidentally turned the machine on too high, Tony and I got covered in powdered sugar. It was hysterical.
There were two recipes in the frosting chapter. One was for marshmallow fondant (“a quick and easy version,” the book said) and the other one was for almond-flavored fondant (“for more experienced decorators”). After watching all those episodes of Sweet Caroline Cakes, I figured I fell into the experienced-decorator category.
We had almost all the ingredients: almond extract, light corn syrup, confectioners sugar, and shortening. We even had the unflavored gelatin because Dad made his own jellies and jams for Christmas presents. The only thing we didn’t have on the ingredients list was glycerin. I didn’t know what it was, but since the recipe called for only one tablespoon of it, I figured it couldn’t be that important.
Everything started out fine. I followed the recipe exactly and kneaded and kneaded until my fingers felt like they were about to fall off. But instead of getting a nice ball of soft dough, all I got was a sticky mess. I tried adding a little more confectioners sugar. And then I tried putting shortening on my hands so the fondant wouldn’t stick. These things didn’t help. Nothing did. It looked like someone melted taffy all over the kitchen counter.
I used my foot to open the cabinet under the sink where we kept the trash can and threw out the whole batch of fondant. Afterward I washed my hands and wiped down the counter.
Cake-decorating wasn’t much fun without Tony.