So it turns out decorating a cake is hard when your medicine is wearing off and your brain is speeding up.
You have to put on a crumb layer first, which is a thin layer of frosting where all the crumbs get caught. It doesn’t matter how it looks because afterward you put the pretty layer of frosting on top. You’re supposed to put your cake in the refrigerator after you do the crumb layer so it can get hard. But I didn’t have time because it was already getting late. I had to put on the top layer right away and crumbs got mixed in. To make matters worse, the cake was also slightly tilted because part of it got stuck when I dumped it out of the pan.
I took a step back and studied my cake.
It reminded me of when Tony and I made a sheet cake as part of our project. Since Tony was a huge fan of Halloween, we made one that looked like a graveyard. It had scary trees, tombstones, and zombies made out of modeling chocolate. But we’d made it at my house and our old oven didn’t bake the cake evenly. (Tony’s family bakery had some big last-minute order so we couldn’t make the cake there.) Parts of the cake were done, and parts were gooey. It was a mess. I was disappointed and ready to make a new one, but Tony just scooped out the gooey parts and we turned them into dug-up graves. “It’s our monsterpiece! Get it?” he’d said.
I’d laughed, and Tony put his arms out in front of himself and started moaning. I pretended to be a zombie, too. We kept moaning, “Brains. Braaaaains,” and laughed until our sides ached.
I sighed.
Fixing Dad’s cake wasn’t as much fun without Tony. But I had to come up with something, so I covered the whole thing with another layer of frosting. That hid most of the crumbs. Next I used M&M’S to spell out WAY TO GO, DAD! In the end, it wasn’t great; but it was decent.
When I let everyone back into the kitchen to show it off, Dad broke into a huge grin. “I love it!”
“You did a good job, honey,” Mom said.
“Yeah,” Sam added. “It’s not completely terrible. I’ll get a knife.”
I ignored the dork and looked at Mom. And then, as casually as I could, I said, “Just think how good I’ll be after I take Sweet Caroline’s class in the fall.”
“We’ll see,” Mom said. “You have to hold up your end of the bargain first.”
“Yeah,” Dad added. “A deal’s a deal.”