My First Cake

When I was a kid living at home, I got it into my head to make my mom a birthday cake.  Cake mix?  Easy.  Icing? Not so much.  I remember searching through her books for a recipe on icing or frosting.  I had no idea how to make it, no concept as to what made it thick and fluffy.  I’m pretty sure I closed my eyes and pointed to a random recipe in the dessert section.

I went to work and combined all of the ingredients in a pot and cooked it on the stove.  I stirred and stirred and it cooked and cooked.  Stirred and cooked.  Stirred and cooked.

Eventually, I lifted the pot off of the heat and let it cool.  It was a brown colour (maybe from too much vanilla) so I decided I needed to change the colour.  I looked into Mom’s pantry and found blue food colouring.  Unfortunately, blue mixed with that particular shade of brown makes puke green.

Once cooled, I poured it onto the round cake that was already placed on a cake plate.  As I started, I realized it really wasn’t thick and fluffy at all, but had the consistency of pea soup.  It ran off the cake, onto the plate and onto the table.  Green sticky pea soup everywhere.

Just then my dad walks in the house and senses anxiety.  He steps into the kitchen, and in his “saving the day” dad-vest, scoops up the plate of seeping mess and whisks it out to the back porch which was directly connected to the kitchen.

He masterly scrapes the icing from around the cake sides and plate with the side of a butter knife (experienced from years of mudding and taping walls in our houses) and makes it look semi-okay.  Whew!  I can breath again as he helps contain the disaster it could have been if mom had seen it!

Throughout the five years I have owned my cake business, when he sees one of my new creations, Dad will chuckle, “You’ve come along way from the drippy green icing I helped you scoop up on the back porch!”


And although there have been MANY disasters in the Cakes by Erin kitchen, and some have been witness to it, I have forever mastered the art of buttercream, and will never, ever close my eyes and point to pick a new recipe!