Happy Birthday Toby

You know you’re a seasoned blogger when you’re bummed that everything turns out perfectly. It makes such a better story when life gets royally screwed up. Flat tire in the rain? Bring it on! Long lines at the DMV and an obnoxious clerk who gets your paperwork wrong and sends you to the wrong line where you waste your entire day? Yes! You can hear the chuckles from the cubicle walls already.

What’s the fun in a chocolate cake from a box mix that turns out perfect without any lumps or bumps? It isn’t lopsided, flat or burnt, the icing goes on smooth without ripping off the top layer of moist crumbs, and you even spell the birthday boy’s name right in soft light blue loopy letters!!! Snore. This is boring. At least bake a pacifier into the cake or slop some of that goopy pudding batter into Baby Bug’s ear or something. Sheesh!

Nope. Nothing hilarious happened. The cake was baked. The baby was securely fastened on like my personal little parasite. I didn’t bang her head on the oven door. I didn’t even make a mess with the eggs or chocolate powder mix. I had the whole day to plan out this little dinner shindig and everything went fine without a hitch.

It does, however, remind me of other shindigs that have gone down with lots of hitches. In fact, I’ve made many chocolate cakes (very much like this one), that turned into lopsided icing messes. I have no idea why the icing went on perfectly yesterday. I have never had such good luck before.

This all also reminds me of the first time Toby made me a cake. Way back when we were still dating (before the hills got dusty) and I had recently decided to turn away from my very tight knit family. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in months. It was a very very sad and lonely time for me. Especially on my birthday. Birthdays in my family were always grand events. Maybe because we didn’t celebrate Christmas we had to make up for it. (And no, my family isn’t Seventh Day Adventist…they’re just different.) There were always mountains of presents and any kind of dinner and cake your heart desired. The whole day was your day and I was pretty much the princess of the party every time my birthday rolled around. So you can imagine how pathetic I was feeling in my sterile white apartment in a new town with no family or friends or even a cat!

I decided to cheer myself up by making myself a cake. Chocolate of course. I’d never baked a cake by myself before. I was up to my ears in chocolate powder when Toby decided to drop by with some birthday flowers he’d picked from the city landscaping. He was so romantic back then… What I didn’t know about Toby then was that he was the master chemist. He took one look at me and my mess and quickly took over. All those years washing rat lungs in a lab taught him that me making a cake was a quick disaster. I know nothing about procedure, precision or orderlyness. I speed read, transpose numbers and skip steps. I talk a lot and get distracted and lose track of where I am. How many cups was that I just dumped into the bowl? I’m a wreck in the kitchen. Especially back then.

I think I fell in love with Toby when that cake came out of the oven. It smelled like cocoa heaven. I’d never seen a cake so beautiful outside of a magazine before. It was round without any sloping or bubbles that threaten to collapse into themselves. If food is the key to a man’s heart then chocolate cake is the key to a woman’s. Of course this is long before I discovered that Toby used to date a stripper, he smoked nearly a pack a day, he kept trash in his car a foot deep and he wears the same shirt for five days in a row*. But those were things I’d learn to love later.

*Not really. He’s just freaky with his clothes. If he finds a shirt he likes, he buys five of them. So it seems like he’s wearing the same shirt over and over. It drives me batty.