Let Them Eat Cake
If I'd had any choice in the matter, I certainly wouldn't have planned to have two kids' and my husband's birthdays only weeks apart. The first two just kind of worked out that way. The third was completely out of my control.
The problem with all these occasions has nothing to do with gifts or parties.
It's about the cake. Or, more accurately, cakes.
Lots and lots of cakes.
Naturally, no one wants to share a birthday celebration, which means we have to do a separate cake for each birthday. Everyone likes the same cake, so we end up with three very rich, very chocolatey chocolate fudge and buttercream cakes every week for three weeks. Each cake lasts a week, so we basically start a new cake just as we finish the previous one. While this may sound like heaven for some people, for me it's a disaster. It is the ominous end of my summer beach body. It is ...
The Enemy of the Thighs.
Of course, I don't have to eat all the cakes. Or even have more than one slice of each cake. But they call to me from the kitchen.
"Forget your thighs. Pay no heed to your hips."
It's the siren cry of the bewitching baked goods. And I am under their sugary spell.
"You know, you could just throw it out after a day or so," said my husband as I complained about my predicament while simultaneously shoving forkfuls of cake into my piehole.
"But that would be a waste of money," I replied. "And I need to save money to pay for the liposuction I'm going to need after I eat all this cake."
He shook his head. He was immune to the call of the cake. And so was my son. I decided it couldn't really be about willpower. Surely it was a genetic issue and my extra X-chromosome was the one that weakened my resistance to cake.
As I worked my way through cake No. 2, I wondered how people who work at bakeries deal with being around cake all day. I thought that maybe they developed a sugar immunity from prolonged exposure. I decided to ask the Cake Boss that question if I ever ran into him.
Meanwhile, back in cake central, I boxed up the cake and brought it back into the kitchen to lie in wait until the next time I passed by and it called out to me.
But as I crossed the threshold into the kitchen, the thigh gods intervened. With the large cake box in front of me, I didn't notice the dog lying on the floor at the door to the kitchen, and I tripped over him, tossing the cake box across the room like a chocolate shot put. The cake landed upside down, and when I went to retrieve it, I discovered that the whole thing had collapsed onto itself and was no longer a chocolate cake. Now it was a chocolate pancake.
My husband walked in and saw me picking up the upside-down cake box from the floor.
"Well, it looks like you solved your cake problem," he said.
I put the cake pancake back on the counter and shook my head.
"Don't be silly," I replied as I grabbed another fork from the drawer. "It ain't pretty, but it still tastes great!"
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Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.
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