In my family there is a story that gets told at every family event and whenever new people are introduced to my family. It is a tale of two girls and their attempt at baking a cake to satisfy their sweet tooth, but what happened could only be described as horrific. In order to completely understand the goal of these two girls you have to understand the history first. They were from a large family with five children, four of which were teenagers and only years apart, so needless to say keeping food in the house was not an easy task. And dessert, forget about it. A 1/2 gallon of ice cream barely made it through one day. Cookies seemed to disappear just as fast as they were bought and anything else that resembled a sweet was usually eaten before it made it to the cabinet. Active teenagers running from school to soccer practice to jobs can work up quite an appetite. Every so often the parents would buy each child a carton of Ben N' Jerry's ice cream in their favorite flavor as a treat in which they could eat it or savor it as they pleased. In order to get through the dry times when the dessert choices resembled a barren desert, they would take it into their own hands to make things from scratch, whether it be making ice cream in a coffee jar rolling it to one another (learned this trick in science class- thank you Bill Nye the Science Guy) or getting out the cookbooks to try to make something resembling a cake or cookie.
Those two ambitious girls were my sister and I, and we will forever live in infamy for the incident of the "Puke Green Cake". It was the weekend and we were bored and wanted something sweet so we raided my Dad's cookbook library in search of an easy cake recipe. Once the recipe was chosen and all the ingredients were secured, we made our cake, so excited for the end product and presenting it to our family at the mandatory Sunday family dinner. I think we had an underlying hope that it would also get us out of dish duty for the night, but that was just silly to us to even hope for. So here we were following every step to the measurement and cooking the cake until it was fluffy and not over-baked and dry. We were so proud of ourselves. Then it was on to the homemade frosting which we had decided on using food coloring to make our beautiful, tasty cake extra special. We were going for purple but somehow even students in honors classes can still completely make a mockery of the color wheel. We both knew that blue + red =purple but the color was not coming out right so we added yellow and all of a sudden our cake frosting starting transforming into this horrible green color that can only be be described as puke green and no matter how we tried we couldn't fix it and only made it worse, if that was at all possible at that point. So okay, maybe our cake wasn't beautiful but at least it would be delicious, because we followed all the directions.
So dinner came to an end and it it the moment to reveal our piece de resistance. Okay it definitely wasn't going to win any beauty contests for looks but the taste was what was important, right? So the cake is cut after everyone makes fun of how unappetizing the color is, yet no one could say no to a piece. Then it was almost as if in perfect synchronization we all went to take a bite, mouths completely full, and with that the look on every one's face turned into a look of agony and disgust and then immediately we were all spitting the cake back onto our plates. I am sure Miss Manners would have plenty to say about this. Our parents held out the longest in an effort to not not make us feel so bad but even they couldn't swallow a bite. We had accidentally mistaken the salt for sugar so not only was our cake puke green but it was a salt cake. In our defense the salt was in the sugar container. This taught me an important lesson which is to taste, taste, and taste again.
So now the lore of our cake is told over and over again and I do not think that we could ever redeem ourselves enough to make anyone forget the salt cake debacle. To this day anytime either of us says we made a cake or volunteers to make a cake their are inquisitive and a frightened looks around the room.
Now you too know the legend of the Green Cake and cooking tip #1 to taste everything you make so you don't have to learn the hard way. At least the story finished with a happy ending with a trip to get ice cream to Baskin Robbins. Maybe that was all part of our ingenious plan to begin with (cut to me twiddling by fingers with my devious smile).
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