Ring Around the Cake

Mom baked a cake for Dad's birthday each year. I'd always thought [read: assumed] that she'd made it from scratch. I'd assumed incorrectly & I should've known better; it's not really her style. (Though it's important to give her a bit of credit as she did find a delicious, from scratch, recipe for chocolate zucchini bread long before it became the craze that it is today. And, once us kids began scarfing the bread down, she was only too ready to make more loaves since she knew how much zucchini she'd put in the recipe. And she's always been a huge fan of the vegetable too. We weren't complaining; we couldn't taste it. 😋)

What I remember most about that cake Mom made was that it was a spice cake, & that it had these along the circumference. I'd been lead to believe that a spice cake, by definition, was to include these. Almost in the same way that when a baker makes peanut butter cookies, those cookies are defined by the crisscross fork formation imprinted atop them. This is what I knew these to be for a spice cake: definition. Dad likes spice & he'd prefer a spice cake. Mom bought this & made sure to have these on hand...Which wasn't difficult because Dad would've been baking since the first week or so of the school year & used these in most of his recipes.

When I'd have a snack after school I'd be interested in occasionally adding these to the snack. Mom would agree to it, though she'd enforce that I was only to eat those which were broken, since she'd need the whole ones for the display atop Dad's cake. My rebelling may have rooted in these moments. I'd really have wanted whole ones. Just because. I'd just been told I was to avoid them; to not have any of them. Like any other, this made me wish to have at least one whole one. Reverse psychology, perhaps? 😁

I don't remember if I ever did eat any of the whole, unbroken ones, though I do remember similarly eating these. There was a box in the cupboard &, as with these, I was looking for a quick after school snack. I asked Mom if I could have some & was told I could have two because they were in the cupboard since Dad had plans to bake with them; he had found a recipe which included them on the list of ingredients.

Mom was discussing my brother's school day with him on the other side of the wall (the kitchen sat on the back of the house's main floor next to the dining room, whereas the living room was directly off the foyer, which ran alongside the staircase making up the front side of the house's main floor); she'd already discussed my school day with me.

She'd be preparing dinner after she finished with him. I knew this, &, because of my disappointment, that is, because I'd been told to limit myself to only two of these, I kept the box out on the countertop & began enjoying them (though I did keep it closed in case she suddenly walked on through). Due to my bitterness over the count limitation, I finished them & realized no one would be any the wiser if I did eat more. So, I opened the box back up & took out two more. As I began eating, what was my third, I realized since it would appear to someone just walking on by that I'd be eating my first, if I kept one out & enjoyed one, then replenished that one, the one I'd just eaten, before eating that other one, the one I'd kept out - then, whenever I was "spotted" or "noticed" (whenever Mom would finally walk into the kitchen), I'd still have one more remaining that I could have when I'd have to officially have the box closed up & put away for Mom to begin prepping dinner.

The flaw in this plan was that Mom continued talking to my brother about his day for many minutes more than my "plan" had been unofficially set. I must have eaten around a dozen of these &, still having that one sitting out of the box as a spare, Mom still hadn't come into the kitchen to "interrupt me". I got to the point where I'd had enough. Between feeling full & being generally discouraged from a "rebelling" plan gone wrong, I'd completely lost all interest. Big. Time. Bummer.

And no one ever did notice, question, or ask about this incident; my eating an additional ten or more never affected Dad's baking or anything else.



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