Why I Don’t Cook For A Living

I mentioned before that I’ve been busy. So busy I wasn’t able to speak in complete sentences. Want to know why?

The treats you see in these plastic baggies are no ordinary muffins. You see, when my mother was a little girl [que flashback music] my great grandmother made her infamous carrot cake. My mother would then have a child of her own – me, in case you didn’t know that – and her mother, my grandmother, would imitate the recipe and tradition of cooking the same carrot cake of her mother during the holidays. The smell of this cake rivaled the taste. While in college, I couldn’t wait to come home for Christmas and get the oh so awesome carrot cake. When my grandmother became too weak and ill to make it, I was devastated. To add to my devastation, no one – NO ONE – in my family knew the recipe. Not even my grandmother. Try as she might, she couldn’t pull it from the archives of her memory. The infamous family carrot cake recipe was lost forever.

Years later, I would marry and move home to Cleveland. My grandmother, still weak and ill, could no longer take care of herself and offered up her house for us to take care of. The house was, and still is, in awful shape. Years of wear, tear, and bad patch jobs doubled as makeshift repairs leave this house in less than stellar living conditions and an astronomical heating bill in winter months due to overwhelming air pockets. During our first year home, BFam and I worked tirelessly to clean the mess my pack rat of a grandmother left behind. She was not a messy woman, but being sick for so long meant she left a lot of things unattended. Most of her paperwork consisted of old gift boxes thrown under her bed for safekeeping. While cleaning her room that would soon become a nursery for the arrival of Mooter, I stumbled upon one of those boxes. Lo and behold, a handwritten recipe paper was found for the carrot cake. I immediately introduced this recipe to the wonderful world of technology and saved it to my computer’s hard drive. The moment I told the rest of the family my good fortune, I was dubbed the carrot cake maker, every year, for every holiday, as long as I live, forever and ever in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.

Last year was the first year I flaked on cake making duties. It’s been hard on BFam and I adjusting to a growing brood of two. An adjustment we’re just now feeling we have under semi-control. To make up for my flaking, I promised my Mom I’d make the cake for Christmas. Apparently, this gesture of goodwill infected my bloodstream and has caused me to function without judgment or reserve because I agreed to a cookie exchange at my job. What did I make? Carrot cake-ettes. Little muffin-like cakes of carroty goodness. Six and a half dozen little muffin-like cakes of carroty goodness. Six. And a half. You do the math.

For the past three nights, my kitchen has looked like this:
And for these same past three mornings at 1:30a, I’ve stumbled into bed next to BFam with no feeling in my legs, arms or back. Today was the first day of my vacation from work. The exchange also took place today. Because of this, BFam was gracious enough to deliver my goodies to the office on my behalf and pick up whatever was exchanged. I still have to make the cake for my Mom. I said I would. I never thought I’d reach the point where I’d say ‘I don’t care if I ever see or eat another carrot cake in my life’…

I don’t care if I ever see or eat another carrot cake in my life.