Stirring the Cake

Today is Mom's birthday, and it's time to tell the stirring the cake story again. I know I haven't told it here.

You see, Mom's birthday comes at a particularly busy time of the school year, which is really the only calendar I've ever been attuned to. In fact I've rarely seen her on her birthday since I started prep school at age 13. We usually just shift the celebration to Thanksgiving--as, indeed, we'll do next week, since we're driving up for Thanksgiving again this year.

In the fall of 1977, I was living with two other girls in a studio apartment in the basement of our prep school infirmary--apparently the school was overenrolled and a few of us lucked out with these "cushy" digs. (We're talking bunk beds and another single bed dropped on top of ugly linoleum, with a little kitchenette in one corner...not terribly cushy, but access to cooking equipment was always worth something.) Abby was living upstairs in a regular double. According to my palm pilot calendar Mom's birthday was on a Thursday that year, so it must have been the day before that Abby and I decided to go into town and get a cake mix to make Mom a cake. Not that she was going to benefit by it, but it was the thought, right? And Wednesdays were half-days for us then, so that must have been it. (Either that, or this happened in the fall of 1976, when her birthday actually fell on a Wednesday. I can't remember what dorm I was in then, but perhaps Abby & I were roommates and I've just conflated two episodes? Not that it really matters...)

Anyway we went into town, got the cake mix, and came back up to my apartment to make the cake. Abby had a trick for making a peppermint chocolate cake--a few drops of peppermint extract in the mix--so we had done that, and the apartment smelled fabulous. Oh, I can still remember how fabulous it smelled.

The cake came out of the oven and we got it cooling, then decided to frost it. It was still pretty warm, but it smelled so tempting we just couldn't wait. We'd bought a can of chocolate frosting, and we popped it open.

Well, you know what happened. It began to fall apart in big clumps, the frosting sticking to the warm cake and pulling it apart. At first we were crestfallen--all our work, going to naught! But pretty quickly we saw the humor in it. We dumped the whole mess into a bowl and just stirred away, frosting and cake in big gobs filling up the bowl. Then we ate it.

Yum.

So that was the year we "stirred the cake." I think we sang happy birthday to Mom as we ate it. I remember it every year around this time, and it gets better and better in my memory, though I don't think I've ever done it again.