Don’t look at the postcard

“Comparisons are odorous.” – William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Act III, Scene V

Let me just suggest something to you. There are very few things that I know for sure in life, but this is one of them: When a recipe states at the top of the instructions that it “depends on skill level,” it might be time to walk away.

Just close the book, walk away, and head to the delightful Sister’s McMullen Darn Good Pastries and Fine Cakes Bakery where not only are the doughnuts raised and sugared every morning fresh, but they also know how to ice a pound cake without pulling off the top every time you lift your knife, creating crumb frosting in the sad, scary, and ultimately lonely process.

I might add a secondary note of caution: when the recipe also calls for the cake to be colored red, shaped like a fire truck, and displaying ladders lovingly sculpted from thin pretzel logs and melted white chocolate for glue, run screaming from the kitchen.

Run, run like the wind.

Oh, if my 3-year-old only liked rectangles or squares, or even circles, I would be so happy. Note to self: introduce her to the happy solid-colored art of Alexander Calder or, better yet, Kasimir Malevich (see illustration). I could probably do a respectable Jackson Pollock cake, too. (And if you go to that Jackson Pollock link and put your cursor on the screen, you can create your own Jackson Pollock! Left click on your mouse and each time you do, you’ll get another color…)

But no, her dreams are all about fire trucks, so a fire truck cake for her birthday it was. And not a flat supermarket cake with a picture of a fire truck drawn on it, oh no. A real 3-D truck made of pound cake (note: pound cake crumbles if you look at it too hard) and sitting on a road of Oreos crushed in the blender (trust me, it looks just like dirt), fire hoses made of green fruit chews rolled into tubes. Wheels made of Oreos with red fruit chew circles as hubcaps and white icing piped on as bolts.

Call me Martha.

It was at the icing stage that I panicked. Besides the fact that my sculpted cake looked like a semi-trailer rig that might have overturned a few times when the driver was sleepy, the whole surface of the cake lifted up onto the knife each time I lifted the blade; John came home from work, walked into the kitchen, and I heard a sharp intake of breath. When I looked up, I saw the grimace he was trying to change into a smile; it wasn’t working. I sent him to Ingle’s for back-up cupcakes. When I held the photograph of the sample cake up beside the misshapen mass in front of me, I felt tears springing hot behind my eyes. It looked nothing like the picture.

I have a great friend named Lucy who could have made this fire truck cake and spun a sugar firehouse with little tiny perfectly detailed fire fighters to boot, all while refinishing her floors, painting her kitchen, and planting color-coordinated azaleas in a pattern that would look like a mosaic of the Sistine Chapel from space, damn her. Her son loves tractors, so she made him a tractor cake one year that looked like it had been commissioned by the John Deere Company. This kind of pressure just doesn’t help the domestically challenged. Surely she never reaches this tear-springing stage.

I pushed past panic to the questioning stage: “What on earth was I thinking?” There were no answers, so I pushed on to the denial stage: “I think it looks good.” After denial came blaming: “If you had printed the picture bigger, I could tell how to lash this pretzel ladder on and attach the melting Fruit Chew ladder.” Blaming was followed closely by hysteria: “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? GET TO INGLE’S IMMEDIATELY FOR SOME CUPCAKES SO THESE POOR CHILDREN WILL HAVE SOME SUGAR TO CONSUME AT THE PARTY!” Shame came next: “I cannot possibly take this monstrosity out in public.” Then resignation and acceptance: “Tess is three. Her friends are three. What do they care?”

It was an exhausting day in my apron. Tess napped as I completed the decorating, twirling the green Fruit Chew hose into its resting place atop the truck, placing the licorice running board, icing the windows white. When she woke up, she ran into the kitchen. “WOW!” She loved it! And she got on her little ladder to see it close up; I was nervous—would she touch it and ruin it? She picked up a yellow M&M (not in my color scheme) and, as if in slow motion, her hand moved toward the cake. I stifled a “NO!” as she pushed it into the side of the cake. “LOOK! A BUTTON!” She spent the next 10 minutes decorating to her own satisfaction. I bit my Martha Stewart tongue.

Twenty-four hours and some dozen failed pretzel ladders later, the big moment arrived. Tess and a few of her tiny friends joined the very fabulous members of Engine Company Number 1 for a special tour of the firehouse, sitting in the fire trucks, watching Tess’ big sister Emma try on fire fighter gear, and getting firefighter badges. Then we walked to a nearby children’s museum for play and sugar.

They loved the fire truck cake. “I HELPED MAKE IT!” Tess screamed with delight. “I HELPED MAKE IT!” She jumped up and down, up and down, up and down. She pointed to her M&M decorations, she pranced and danced and twirled, exclaiming her part in the cake to all her 38-inch-tall friends. Once they figured out that the dirt was made from Oreos, it was all over. The fire truck was demolished and eaten in 8 minutes flat, leaving only Fruit Chew hub cabs and a Dalmatian doggie candle on the tray.

It was worth every moment of truck agony, self-doubt as a cake icer. Why did I compare myself to Martha Stewart?

When Emma was in the 6^th grade, she had an assignment to make a castle as part of a unit in school. We all sat at the dinner table and discussed options. Foam core? PVC? Construction paper? Welded metal? No! Gingerbread! Let’s make a gingerbread castle. My lord, how hard could it be?

Walk away. Run.

I burned up the motor in my mixer on the first batch, requiring me to run to Best Buy and pick up that nice Kitchen Aid mixer I had always wanted. I figure the gingerbread project, once I added in all the equipment, the mixer, and supplies, was a good down payment on a new car. We found a pattern, requiring us to cut gingerbread dough into 1,218 pieces of intricate wall sections, bake them, and magically piece them together. After baking, we had no idea how to glue the pieces together. (By the way, gingerbread doesn’t remain perfectly flat while baking, in case you were wondering).

So John did what anyone would do—he called the White House to ask what edible paste the chefs use to make the gingerbread White House. The White House switchboard, after hearing the story of Emma making a gingerbread castle for a school project, asked John to hold. Next he knew, he was talking for 10 minutes with Thaddeus DuBois, the White House chef.

We used his recipe.

Nothing stuck. I’m not saying it’s the White House’s fault; I have a new admiration for anything made of gingerbread.

At around 3 a.m., we decided that it would be a project about castle ruins. This decision was further underscored when in a split second, our dog Blue ate the northwest corner of the structure. After watching these proceedings for about 20 hours, Blue performed like an NFL linebacker, studying the field until the opening appeared, lunging for the hole in our defenses.

Would I have changed anything about that experience? No. These are the stories that make up our lives. It’s a great tale for us to laugh about and hey, I got my dream Kitchen Aid mixer out of the pain. And when Tess is older, she’ll love the photos and stories of her fire truck cake. What is success? Sometimes it’s laughing at the process and embracing the end result even when it doesn’t look like a magazine photo shoot. Sometimes, it’s not making that comparison at all—am I as thin as the models I see in magazines, is my home as beautiful as the ones in Architectural Digest, does the Grand Canyon look as striking in person as it does on the picture postcard? Walker Percy has said that the preformed symbolic complex of the Grand Canyon (and by extension, anything that we compare to the image of itself) keeps us from actually seeing it:

“It is almost impossible (to see) because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s mind.  Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated–by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folder, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer’s pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from the progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex.  If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, ‘Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!’  He feels he has not been cheated. But if it does not conform, if the colors are somber, he will not be able to see it directly; he will only be conscious of the disparity between what it is and what it is supposed to be. He will say later that he was unlucky in not being there at the right time.  The highest point, the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex….”

We should regain sovereignty over our experience, shouldn’t we? Make the cake and don’t compare it to the one made by the White House chef. Find our own Grand Canyon, not the postcard one.

I’ve signed Emma and myself up for cooking classes with a woman who teaches in a small cabin on her 1928 woodstove. Emma’s a pickle aficionado, so on July 15^th, she and I will go learn to make pickles, pickled beets, never-fail dill pickles, Aunt Lula’s cabbage/pepper relish, 19th century piccalilli, Effie’s yellow squash and onion pickles, herbed icebox pickles, and a 1915 spiced peach pickle. I’ve already started working on Tessie so she’ll ask for a pickle cake next June. I’ve never seen such a thing, so it’ll be perfect.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Go ahead, make the fire truck cake. Don’t settle for what’s easy—go for the Eiffel Tower sculpted from marshmallows, the class project made completely from gingerbread cut and baked into intricate, crenulated towers, the science project created entirely of licorice and white chocolate shavings. Why settle for easy?

And don’t look at the postcard, the model, the sample, the dream home—that’s not life, that’s idealized pressure, shaping us in ways that aren’t aspirational, but detrimental. In looking at the postcard, you miss the Grand Canyon that’s right in front of you.