Culinary Catharsis and Regional Ruckus

Ha. Alliteration. Makes life so much more worthwhile.

You know what's really sad? I have to be up at 4:45 tomorrow [AM, not PM].

You know what's even more sad? The thought of only getting 5ish hours of sleep isn't all that menacing to me anymore.

Welcome to reality. Get up early, go to bed late, kick my own bum every second in between. That's how it goes.

But tomorrow is the Regional competition for Destination Imagination, the organization that owned my soul eight years ago and still keeps the deed. This is my eighth Regional day--eighth!--and it's probably THE most ridiculous one my team and I have ever encountered.

We perform at 7:36. Yes, that's AM, again. I've said it once, I'll say it again: 7:36 AM.

So tonight, before I crawl into bed and hope like crazy that all goes well tomorrow, I decided to bake a cake.

Don't be so shocked. I actually can bake. In fact, it's my backup stress reliever; when I can't write because I'm stuck in the muck of writer's block, I turn to the wonder of the culinary arts to save me.

The cake turned out... okay, I guess. I've never made a cake from scratch before, so I knew it wouldn't be perfect. I did kind of hope that it would go a little bit more smoothly, but hey, it works for me. :] At least Maddy came over to assist me in my daring scheme.

It was supposed to be a marble layer cake. No baking cocoa, so it became a vanilla layer cake. Then the second layer vanished, so it became a very small vanilla cake. Half of the bottom fell out when I flipped it, making it an even smaller vanilla cake.

Our original "White Mountain Frosting" [I definitely did not name that] hardened on the mixer, literally becoming a tasteless--but most assuredly not odorless--form of a homemade Jolly Rancher. That certainly was fun, let me tell you.

So we went with powdered sugar icing. The cake didn't cool enough before we frosted it, so the icing melted down the sides and created a pretty little moat around the edges. Eventually I got to use the colored stuff to make the DI symbol and write the year.

Of course I'm giving it to my DI team. I'm the unofficial second mother to four perpetually hungry teenage boys [and Kailey, who likes to be just as goofy as them :P]. Who else would I make a cake for?

You know what, though? I love my DI team. We're so different from each other, and yet so very similar sometimes. After working with the same people for so long, you form bonds that can't be shattered. You can't beat that kind of camaraderie and support.

They've been there for me, and I'll be there for them. And that is why I went through all the trouble to bake a flipping cake the night before competition. :]