It’s become a joke in our family when birthdays roll around for at least one of my kids and/or my partner to risk life and limb by asking when I’m going to make the cake… and then ask when I’m going to re-make the cake.
So when I woke up to this lovely gash this morning, I couldn’t say I was surprised.
Not after the Lin-Manuel Miranda debacle…
Or Harry Potter Disaster…
But, you see, the thing is, in party cakes as in theater and writing, you have two options:
Sit on the floor and cry about it,
Or have your cry, then put on your big girl panties, pull off the pieces that are still intact, mix up some new icing, and start the re-icing process.
There is a third option, which is to get professional help picking up the pieces. (I help clean up stories, as well as cakes. Check out my editing services here!)
And that’s what I was determined to do this morning! I hauled myself over to the specialty cake store, pictures of my icing fail in hand, and set about getting professional help with my perpetual problem.
The “cake lady” as my littlest calls her, just laughed. “I have no idea!”
We went through the list of typical offenders:
Not thawing a frozen cake before icing?
Icing emulsion breaking?
Not crumb coating?
Over crumb coating?
Mixing icing types?
Leaving real butter buttercream in a hot room?
In the end, none of those were the culprits, and all we could agree on was that it is a weird problem to have.
So, like with the Harry Potter cake…
And the Lin-Manuel Miranda cake…
After I had my good cry, I channeled Tim Gunn and reminded myself that I have to “Make it work!”
So, that’s what I did!
I scraped the old off.
I mixed new icing and started over.
And, just like often happens when I’m deconstructing a story, it might be even better than it was before this morning’s crisis.
So, in honor of a deconstructed-reconstructed cake, I’m going to go tear apart a story. Hop over to the socials and drop a line and tell me what you’re constructively destroying this week!
