The BetsyG-Spot

By BetsyG

Dear readers, I apologize for this very late post, but I have been genuinely flat-out for the past bunch of days. Some of that which is keeping me so busy is legitimate—work, motherhood, writing for The BetsyG-Spot—but I have to blame my self-inflicted obsession with The Cake for taking up far too much of my precious time.

My son is playing baseball on a travel team this spring; through a freakish twist of fate, I’ve produced an uber athlete. (I challenge you to find an aspect of his body that even vaguely resembles mine. Okay, maybe the fingers.) Last night was a family night for all the teams that play under this particular team umbrella, and the U11 families were supposed to bring dessert. (In case you are likewise uninitiated into the whole travel league thing, U11 means they are under 11 years old as of a certain date.)

Given how very slammed I am and have been, I figured for sure I would buy something. Alex, of course, wanted me to make my increasingly famous Red Velvet Cake, which I definitely did not have any time for. In addition to having a very busy work day yesterday, I had to pick up Alex at 3:30 from school, bring him to Hebrew school, drop my son Matthew off at home, return to the school for a school council meeting, get Alex at 6, and be at the baseball event at 6:30. Do you see time in there for cake baking?

So there was definitely no time for Red Velvet Cake. But then it suddenly came to me: how cool would it be if I instead made a blue velvet cake with yellow frosting to match the team colors? And how cool would it be if I drew the team mascot—a wolf—on the cake? Once this idea hit me, I knew the cake had to be.

So yesterday, between interviewing statisticians, reviewing designs of pdf files, having phone meetings, and driving kids to and fro, I made the cake:

Team cake

I realized just before I started to draw the thing that I had no blue icing for decorating. I’d also failed to leave any plain white frosting to color blue. I did manage to find a tube of white cake-decorating material, which I used to color the center of the cake, then drew the wolf using a toothpick dabbed with blue food coloring.

I had been warned by someone with experience making blue desserts that people might not eat a blue cake, perhaps because it just feels wrong to eat blue things. Perhaps the bigger problem was that the cake came out a shade of teal (chocolate + blue = teal):

Alarmingly green cake

The fact that you are looking at leftovers of my amazing Red Velvet Cake tells you the color was off-putting.

Thus, I blame the cake for the lateness of this post and for the fact that I have nothing to write about but cake. I thought I had written about cake for you quite enough before today, but apparently there is more to be said about cake that I just couldn’t have foreseen.

And now, off to work with me.