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This cake means nothing to me. I found it on allrecipes.com when I learned of this assignment. Seemingly a simple request; tell us about a family recipe, tell us a happy family story. Tell us about how your mother baked chocolate chip cookies with you on Sundays or how your father taught you to make spaghetti. My family is not like that. I grew up in a world where we heated up frozen dinners and ate whatever leftovers were in the fridge because we could not afford for them to go to waste. We have never been a family to bond or build each other up. The homes I grew up in were plagued by alcoholism, Bipolar Disorder and abuse and by age twelve I was making most of my own meals. So here I am now, knowing thirty percent of my grade depends on erasing the last fifteen years of my life. I sit on the floor, against the wall in the Lit Lab, reflecting on this fate.
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She sits beside me and asks what I am doing. She knows the intricate details of the life I live and it comes as no surprise to her when I tell her that I have nothing. She smiles and tells me to come over the following day, she will bake a cake with me. There is not much to say, it's just a cake. We mixed the wet ingredients and then the dry, then played cards on her living room floor. It's just a cake, but it's more. It's my best friend, willing to spend her time making me feel less alone, however inconvenient for her. It's my friends, each of us a fork in hand, eating this meaningless cake, laughing around a kitchen table. There is always talk of chosen families yet it is said that blood is thicker than water. Batter however, is thicker than blood. This is just a cake, it doesn’t have history more than a few weeks old, but history isn’t always as valuable as we make it out to be.
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Just a Basic Vanilla Cake:
Ingredients: 1 cup white sugar ½ cup butter 2 eggs 2 tsp vanilla extract 1 ½ cups all purpose flour 3 tbsp cornstarch 1 ¾ tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ¾ cup milk 1 Tub of Betty Crocker cream cheese frosting Rainbow sprinkles 1 small tube of black icing |
Instructions:
1. Preheat oven to 350℉. Grease and flour a 9x9-inch pan. 2. Beat sugar and butter together in a medium bowl until creamy. Beat in eggs, 1 at a time, then stir in vanilla extract. 3. Combine flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt in another bowl. 4. Add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Stir in milk until batter is smooth. Pour or spoon batter into the prepared pan. 5. Bake in the preheated oven until it springs back to the touch, 30 to 40 minutes. 6. Let the cake cool for one hour. 7. Cover the cake in a healthy coating of frosting. 8. Cover the cake with an amount of rainbow sprinkles of your choosing. 9. Write the name of your teacher in black icing across the top. |
We probably should
have
tied up our hair...
Winning at spit
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Blaudog icing
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Cracking eggs
Grateful for these people
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