“Must Make Many Cakes this Month of May”

May 15th “Must Make Many Cakes this Month of May”

Can you “Bake a Cake?”

Just have to start this off with a fact of LIFE… Most CAKES were made from scratch some sixty-three years ago… but when I had gone to the Grocery Store…a new item on the shelf… the Cake in a Box to make!

This was entirely new to me…just about to start High School in the Fall…and when “DORO” was dumb…she was really dumb!

What happens when I start feeling good? Really good! I would like a piece of homemade cake… from scratch!

The recipes are all so enticing and I can hardly wait to see just which one… will I choose? Every so often – when I think back in time to when I first was going to make a cake – I don’t know – if I should cry or just start laughing so hard that I do cry – over the big mess!

When cake mixes first made their entrance to the store’s shelf – they were something to really consider – would they be faster, easier, and taste better or what? In the early 1950’s – I was about “14” and the cost of a box of cake mix was only thirty cents.

After school, I went to the “Food Center, on Warne Avenue” and got the different things I thought I would need. When my mother came home from work, told her my idea of making a box cake? We never made a “Box Cake” – the only way we ever made a cake was from scratch! I think that I read everything on that cake box, and everything that it said that I needed, I got out and put on the kitchen table. (Everything was at my fingertips.)

So, with the bowl and large spoon to do the mixing of the ingredients by hand – I was ready. You would have thought – I was getting ready for “Major Surgery” – without a mask!

The pans were greased and floured… the oven was turned on… everything in the bowl… mixed and mixed by hand and then into the pans… nicely level the pans – and into the oven! The timer was set and I was sure waiting very patiently for cake made… the newest up-to-date way.

The time was nearly up... a burning of the over-flowing cake dough all over the inside of the oven…“what’s wrong”… what happened? I could see a “fine mess” that I had made and now needing to be cleaned up and the sooner the better!

Started going over every step of the instructions on the cake box? ……….“Can you guess what happened?”

On the table still sitting… as big as they were … the “2” large eggs that the “Cake Mix” called for in the recipe!

Such a mess…that runny dough burning all over every place and into every little crack that it could find…it started to smell like I had set the house on fire!

This taught me a very good lesson…haste makes waste when you are baking…take time to read directions…until you understand them…backward and forward…unless you like a real dirty mess… that takes forever to clean up!