Sometimes I Suck at Cooking

Once upon a time I made the world’s worst cake.

The Broncos were playing in the Superbowl and my parents traveled to New Orleans for the game, leaving my brother, sister and me with a babysitter. Since big celebrations like birthdays always had a cake, I thought I’d make an orange and blue cake to celebrate the Broncos big day.

I didn’t know how to make frosting, so I looked up a recipe in a cookbook and turned on a burner to start melting stuff. The cake was done at the same time so I pulled it out of the oven & put it on the stove to cool. As I ran around the kitchen pulling out ingredients for my frosting, I caught the cake out of the corner of my eye and it was “steaming.” Or more accurately, as my nose filled me in shortly after, it was burning because I had put it on the burner that I had turned on. No harm done though, the top of the cake still looked fine.

Still determined, I carefully followed directions to make the frosting and then dyed it blue. As I started to frost the cake, it seemed thin (turns out there’s a difference between frosting and a glaze recipe for coffee cake). My mom had taught me to use flour to thicken cookie dough when it wasn’t quite right, so that seemed like a good ingredient to use to thicken my frosting.

As the Superbowl game started I proudly served my cake to my brother, sister & babysitter. Always one to dive right into food, my brother, Mike, took the first bite of what turned out to be nasty, burnt cake with a rubbery blue frosting. Poor guy. I still feel bad about the face he made trying to eat my cake.

My sweet cooking skillz have gotten mostly better, but I still have a few doozies every once in awhile. This week I made chicken with beans & veggies. I’m not exactly sure what I was thinking when I added the spices to the beans, but it was something along the lines of “the more the merrier.”

Whatever delicious potential there was from that dish was completely lost because Will & I could barely eat it. We started out drinking water to alleviate the pain, then decided that we needed milk, then decided there wasn’t enough fat in the milk to help our blazing mouths so we resorted to full-fat yogurt. We definitely didn’t finish dinner and I think I’m banned from the spice aisle for a few weeks until our mouths finally cool off.