Paddle Attachment

For some reason during the quarantine, it has been decided (the passive voice there is not an accident) that the cakes for my kids' birthdays will be made by me. Given the surfeit of baking vlogging and instagrammery in the past two months, it seems to drift confidently along the line of the cultural tide, but I'm going to point out to you the same thing I pointed out to my kids, many times: the fucking bakery is open, you guys. The professional one down the street. You know, the one where they made literally all the other birthday cakes you've ever had in your lives, the slow-moving pageant of embarrassing wantlessness of your lives. But you need this now, from me, who went 45 years and 11 months making exactly one (1) cake* and now has made TWO in the past 15 days. And two different kinds of cakes! From scratch! With different frostings! Both also from scratch!

OK, they didn't ask me to make them from scratch. That's fair. The middle one did specifically ask for an Italian meringue icing, so I did have to do that, but the rest of it is kind of on me being curious. But no! We won't be drawing all the blame onto myself. There's a reason why it's 11 pm on a Thursday night and I'm just now getting to this, though my feet and lower back hurt from all the standing and mixing and stand mixing, and bowl-side-scraping and frosting and the dishes, Jesus Marimba, the dishes. All this while loaded up on enough sugar and fat just from the necessary production testing and tasting that the next time I get a cholesterol screen, my doctor is just going to stab me in the heart real slow, like that Nazi guy did Adam Goldberg in Saving Private Ryan, as a pre-emptive mercy. Do you know what's in cream cheese frosting? It's not just cream cheese! It's also butter! And the one I did had four cups of powdered sugar. I didn't even know you were legally allowed to own that much powdered sugar at once. I felt like Ray Liotta in the third act of Goodfellas.

It's fine though because the riptide under the cultural current at the moment has to do with a full-on batshit fanaticism about one's hobbies. It's not fending off the insanity of isolation or boredom, it's the self-aware swapping out of one insanity, a destructive and nihlist one rooted in fear, for another, which is also nihilist and fear-based but at least at the end of it you might get a nice challah. So fine, dad likes to bake, he can make an Italian meringue or whatever shit I saw for four seconds on YouTube, let's do that. Let's give the tired old guy a container of 238-degree boiling sugar syrup and a  whirring, angry hand mixer and see what goes down.

I did it. There are no burns, or at least none that will permanently scar. But I'm just doing what everyone else is doing as we lean into our hobbies. We're a vast, diverse country. Sometimes your hobby is undermining public order by threatening elected officials with firearms. Or racially based murder. Or giving other people potentially lethal diseases. Or sourdough starter, did I miss that one? Sourdough starter.

It's probably not polite to describe TikTok as the Dancing Plague of 2020. But that's a thing too.

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*A Boston cream pie in roughly 1998. I think it came out OK?