Poo?

Joe – don’t read this one. And mom, I’m talking about bowel movements, which aren’t funny, so you should skip this one as well.

Devon is going off to college in the fall. He knows how to make toast and pour milk and sneak wine. That is about the end of his culinary skills at the moment so when he asked me a few weeks ago if I would sign him up for cooking classes, I got excited. Kind of just excited to spend time with him because, dude, I’ll be in those classes with him, but also because it shows he’s thinking farther into the future than when he can have his next LAN party.

Anthony has always loved cooking (pickles) and asked if he could come as well. So, maybe an odd threesome, but I’m very much looking forward to it. And, it’s not dancing. Although I might still try to sneak that in.

Over the weekend we decided to give some baking a try. Now, cooking I can do pretty well most of the time. I’ve learned that beets and beef don’t go together and somewhere in the recesses of my mind I remembered how to make a mean white sauce. Baking, however, is a completely different thing. It’s a science. Things have to be in proportion or bad things happen. I can’t just throw in an extra teaspoon of this or that and give it a taste. Everything has raw eggs in it and is runny or bumpy. It could be hours before you find out if your mixing and whisking was successful. Substitutions don’t always go well. And you should probably read the entire directions before you start, just in case you don’t have everything you need and just in case you start making the sauce that goes on the outside like frosting but you think it’s for the batter so you start pouring it and mixing before you realize that you just added twice as much liquid and 100% too much milk (since there was no milk in the recipe to start with) and then have a huge mess in the oven when the cake rounds explode all over the oven and it burns and stinks up the entire house until you put a cookie tray underneath and catch the last bit of it. And it looks terrible. Kind of like poo. Kind of like poo strips. Which you take off the tray and put on a plate for your son who thinks it is so funny he can hardly stand it.

Case in point:

Tyler, who was not emotionally invested in the least in our baking session, was free to throw jokes around willy-nilly. It was sad and funny at the same time. But it tasted delicious. We ate the crap out of that poo cake.