I’d like to start off this post with a simple disclaimer: I’m actually pretty good in the kitchen, maybe even better than you might think that I am. I just need to lead with that…

This story has been told to many people over the past 16 years or so and it has always been met with big laughs. I’m hoping that I can recreate the humor of the story in this post. I think you’ll enjoy it!

Let’s rewind to the early 2000’s; the exact year doesn’t matter. I was old enough to know better. I had decided to make my girlfriend (somehow, now my wife) a cake for her birthday. As much as I wanted to show up with a Dairy Queen cake (which she undoubtedly would have preferred), a sheet cake, or one of those big ones that I could pop out of; I decided to bake her a cake.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any cake mix laying around so I went to town to grab her favorite: vanilla cake with Rainbow Chip frosting. We only lived about a half mile outside of town, so no big deal! I was happy to do it! After I got the necessities: Betty Crocker cake mix, rainbow chip frosting, and a Mountain Dew to fuel my baking endeavor, I was ready to go!.

When I got home, I looked at the box and read the directions:
1.) Preheat the oven to 350ish
2.) Mix ingredients for about 2 minutes.
3.) Bake.
4.) Cool & frost.
5.) Enjoy.
That’s slightly paraphrasing, but you get it. I turned on the oven and started mixing ingredients: Pre-packaged flour mixture, check. Vegetable oil, check. Milk, check…..3 whole eggs.

This is where things hit a bit of a snag. The box said “3 whole eggs”, with a picture of 3 whole eggs. . .

Now, this didn’t seem quite right to me. I don’t remember ever seeing 3 whole eggs go into anything that my mom had baked before. Most of her stuff turned out pretty good and anything that didn’t, she blamed on the oven anyways! So I thought “Okie dokie!” and threw them in. 3 complete and shelled eggs. I continued to mix up my concoction; thinking “I might be in contention for ‘Best Boyfriend of the Year’, this is gonna be great!”. Once I got everything mixed up to my liking, I put it in the greased 9×13 pan and baked for 32-35 minutes.

About a half hour later, I took out the cake from the oven–it smelled AMAZING!
But… something looked odd. The nice golden brown cake had white ‘speckles’ everywhere, some speckles were bigger than others, but it was pretty noticeable. Now, I knew I probably did something wrong, but couldn’t put my finger on it. So I did what any teenager does when something goes wrong:

“Hello, Mom?…Yeah…umm… I don’t think the egg whites mixed in very good with Kate’s cake”

Yep, that’s right. I referred to the broken pieces of shell as “egg whites”. (We couldn’t afford the fancy brown ones—which in hindsight, would have probably cleared this whole mess up right away). What you will read below is a rough translation of a phone call that took place one October afternoon in the early 2000’s between one teenager and a very confused mother.
Mom: “Well they….what? Are you sure? They should have just dissolved into the mixture”
Me: “Yeah, well they didn’t, I can see them”
Mom: “You can see them? What do you mean you can see them?”
Me: “I don’t know, like….I can see them…with my eyes. They stand out pretty good against the golden brown cake”
Mom (at this point probably realizing that saving for my college education was a giant waste of time): “Maybe you didn’t mix it very well…you did 2 minutes, right?”
Me: “Yeah…I didn’t time it, but I think so”
Mom: “Well, maybe you have to try again”
Me: *Dumps entire cake into trash can*

Back to town I go, hi-ho, hi-ho-hi-ho-hi-ho…

Round 2.

This time, the oven is very well pre-heated. To this day, I’m pretty sure that I never turned it off. I grabbed the pre-packaged flour, the milk, the vegetable oil and started mixing these three things together first.

And then I grabbed the 3 little eggs….BUT, this time; they got their own special treatment. They got their own little bowl, with an immersion blender. This time, I took all 3 eggs (‘egg whites’ included) and ground the literal hell out of them with that immersion blender. After about 5 minutes of this, I had 3 mixed eggs with a very ‘pea-soup’ like consistency.

I dumped my egg mixture into the rest of the ingredients and shouted: “Alexa! set a timer for two minutes”.

Just kidding, this was ‘back in the day’, we didn’t have luxuries like Alexa. I used my phone, like a caveman.

I mixed it for 2 minutes and threw it into the oven. 32-35 minutes later, the most beautiful single layer cake you’ve ever seen came out of the oven! Cooled that thing off, and slapped on some frosting.

I practiced my speech for the “Boyfriend of the Year” award ceremony on the entire drive to her house.

I showed up to her house, puffed out my chest, and presented her with her favorite type of cake. She was really excited! I could barely decide on how I was going to spend all of these “brownie points”! Since her mom was home as well, we all chatted for awhile and then it was the time that I’ve all been waiting for: cake time. We cut the cake and were ready to eat when at the very last second…

Like, literally the last possible second–cake was on the fork, centimetres from our mouths-just like a dramatic movie scene.

My mom calls, basically in tears. She was now at home and had pieced this mess together. I most likely didn’t clean up anything from making the two cakes (#teenager), so she had a pretty hot trail to follow.
Mom: “Did you put the….Did you put the….*uncontrollable laughter*…Did you put WHOLE eggs into the cake?”
Me: “YOU SAID THE EGG WHITES WOULD DISSOLVE!!!”
Mom (now browsing convertibles with my college savings): “Yes, the egg WHITES would dissolve…the SHELLS would not!! *more uncontrollable laughter* I can’t believe you put the whole egg in!….wait….*now laughing at near-fatal levels*…did you make TWO cakes THE SAME WAY???!”
Me: “…..But….the picture on the back……(now immediately realizing the magnitude of my stupidity)..umm”

*click*

I yelled out to Kate and her mom: “Don’t eat the cake!! IT’S POISON!”. I then had to explain why we couldn’t eat this particular cake. I also told her that if she wanted to be with someone who knew the difference between an ‘egg shell’ and an ‘egg white’ that I would understand and could show myself out.

Now, Kate and her mom; being the nice, ‘never hurt anyone’s feelings’ types of people they are said “we can still eat it!”. Ah yes, the pity was in full force that afternoon, but I took it anyways. We all ate one piece, and then I ate about 4 more just to prove a point. In all honesty, it probably wasn’t as bad as many of you are thinking. The flavor was very good; but the texture…. Man, that texture was a bit ‘gritty’.

To this day, anyone who knows this story will bring it up in some capacity whenever a baked good or eggs are being prepared in my presence.

I hope this story got you to laugh, or at least smile and blow air out of your nose a little harder at times. 2020 sucks, but we’ll make it through! Mental health has taken a hit recently for a lot of people and they say that laughter is the best medicine, so I hope this helped. If you liked the story, please share it with your friends and family that you think could use a good laugh at my expense.

Take care everyone,

ML

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