How we gonna end up feelin'?
Several months ago I got a hankering for cake, but had no cake pans, so I made it in a loaf pan. Then I patted myself on the back for brilliance, ate half a loaf of cake, put the cake in my cake carrier, and completely forgot the cake ever existed. The cake carrier was slowly absorbed back into the living mess that is my apartment, resurfacing occasionally but never long enough to remind me there was cake in it. By the time I remembered it was at least a month, if not two, since I'd baked it.
Which is about a century in cake years.
I didn't open the cake carrier. At the time it was simple laziness. Why deal with a slightly fuzzy cake if it's so conveniently out of sight, out of mind in its little metal carrier? I'd just do it later. And as later slid along to cover days that turned into weeks which threatened to stretch to months, my reluctance changed from pure lethargy to growing fascination. What did that cake look like? Gray? Green? Black and white? Maybe the carrier sealed off well enough that there's no mold at all and it's as sprightly yellow as the day it came out of the oven. Or maybe it looks like a guinea pig on St. Patrick's day. I'm free to imagine a host of horrors with the lid on. Enclosed, it is Schrödinger's Cake. Who am I to meddle in the affairs of the quantum? I dubbed it the "chia cake" and mostly forgot it was even there.
Over time my feelings toward the chia cake have changed from fascination to a sensibly irrational sort of fear. I don't want to open the cake carrier not because I don't want to ruin the surprise, but because, in the back-road corners of my horrified imagination, I'm afraid I won't be able to get the lid off. I can almost hear the dry crunch and feel the sudden jerking stop as my arm tries to lift the top away and can't pry it off more than an inch because the mold inside has grown so prodigiously as to have bonded with the metal of the carrier and as I am choking back a small shriek of horror at this realization a thick fuzzy gray tentacle darts out of the opening and grabs my wrist and I become famous (post-mortem) for making the worst cake EVER.
And besides, what if it isn't anything near that bad and, as empty-handed as Geraldo in Al Capone's vault, I'm left with nothing but expired possibilities and a vague sense of dissatisfaction about the cake that could have been?
I mean, man. What a theoretical let down.
Which is about a century in cake years.
I didn't open the cake carrier. At the time it was simple laziness. Why deal with a slightly fuzzy cake if it's so conveniently out of sight, out of mind in its little metal carrier? I'd just do it later. And as later slid along to cover days that turned into weeks which threatened to stretch to months, my reluctance changed from pure lethargy to growing fascination. What did that cake look like? Gray? Green? Black and white? Maybe the carrier sealed off well enough that there's no mold at all and it's as sprightly yellow as the day it came out of the oven. Or maybe it looks like a guinea pig on St. Patrick's day. I'm free to imagine a host of horrors with the lid on. Enclosed, it is Schrödinger's Cake. Who am I to meddle in the affairs of the quantum? I dubbed it the "chia cake" and mostly forgot it was even there.
Over time my feelings toward the chia cake have changed from fascination to a sensibly irrational sort of fear. I don't want to open the cake carrier not because I don't want to ruin the surprise, but because, in the back-road corners of my horrified imagination, I'm afraid I won't be able to get the lid off. I can almost hear the dry crunch and feel the sudden jerking stop as my arm tries to lift the top away and can't pry it off more than an inch because the mold inside has grown so prodigiously as to have bonded with the metal of the carrier and as I am choking back a small shriek of horror at this realization a thick fuzzy gray tentacle darts out of the opening and grabs my wrist and I become famous (post-mortem) for making the worst cake EVER.
And besides, what if it isn't anything near that bad and, as empty-handed as Geraldo in Al Capone's vault, I'm left with nothing but expired possibilities and a vague sense of dissatisfaction about the cake that could have been?
I mean, man. What a theoretical let down.
posted by Betsi at 9:20 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home