I'm also parboiling chicken and sausages so they can sit in marinade before going on the grill. I want the meat to cook quickly because we are in the throes of a horrifying heat wave that probably wouldn't even serve as a blip on the radar to my Southern friends, but to us wimpy New Englanders, it feels like the Fires of Hades have been raging for five straight days.
Back to the cake. While I'm in the store shopping, I decide that a bakery cake is too expensive. (It's not really when I add in all the extra costs beyond a cake mix.) I also decide that it's okay to spend the $2.79 on a tube of icing so I can write something foul and politically inappropriate on the cake. Honestly, I stand in the aisle and debate (out loud) whether or not I am worth the $2.79 it costs for the icing. I mean, it's a cake. Is anyone really going to care?
In the end I decide that I am, indeed, worth $2.79 of icing.
I bake the cake (with every air conditioner I own blasting on high), let it cool, then frost it. It's a chocolate fudge cake with chocolate fudge frosting, so the icing I buy is white. Finally, the time comes to write on the cake with the ... icing ...
Damnit. I go through the receipt. The tube of icing is the only item that somehow has not made it into the bags and into my house.
I retrace my steps, check out the trunk of my car, recheck all of the bags, and then repeat the process. It simply cannot be. I don't really want to go back to the store because it's going to be mobbed and because it's a few miles further than the small satellite store where I usually shop.I decide to go to the satellite store and beg them to let me grab a tube of icing. No problem, the kid at the courtesy counter tells me. I thank him profusely, leave my original receipt with him, and run to the baking aisle.
Guess what? No icing tubes. Not a single one. I panic. I find stockers nearby and ask them where the tubes of cake icing are for decorating cakes. "By the ice cream," they tell me, "there are spray cans." I run toward the ice cream aisle, but my brain is trying to chew on what I've just been told: Spray cans? Of icing?!
"I'll gladly pay the difference," I say, and hand over the fifty cents I owe the store that saves my cake. Oh well, I guess I'm worth $3.29 now. I figure it's still a good deal, although a pre-made store-bought cake would've been infinitely easier and more cost-effective at this point.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone. Enjoy your independence ... for as long as it lasts. (Insert smart-ass face here.)
