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A raised fork in silent celebration

Late-night Cakewalk

Today wasn’t the best day. On top of the usual Sunday blues, I had a big paper due and I…

By Brooke Hykaway , in Degrees of Success: A grad student learns to cook , on March 22, 2010 Tags: , , ,

A raised fork in silent celebration

Today wasn’t the best day. On top of the usual Sunday blues, I had a big paper due and I still wasn’t feeling 100% (I’ve had a cold for what feels like forever).

So in hopes of cheering myself up I decided to bake a cake. I hear that baking lifts the spirits, and if not baking then definitely .

This was going to be a challenge; , and I’m not the most attentive scientist. As if baking weren’t enough of a risk for me, I decided to start baking this cake when my second wind picked up around 10:15 pm.

I knew that a nice piece of chocolate cake and a glass of milk would be a great bedtime snack if anything else. My mom always used to make so I looked it up and was pleasantly surprised.

It’s a one-pan process; you just mix everything up and pop it in the oven. It was fairly easy, which was a welcome break after Eggs Benedict and especially since it was already nighttime. I say fairly because it would be inaccurate for me to say really easy – nothing cooking/baking related is really easy for me.

Since I took a pretty tame approach to the cake, I wanted to spice up the icing. But not literally – I’m not the biggest fan of spice. Carling’s impersonation of me goes something like this: “Wow, what’s in this salsa, an onion?!”

My great-grandma used to make a coffee icing which I remember being really tasty. This probably has something to do with my current addiction to coffee (note: I’m still empty-handed at right now).

Late-night baking compromises.

I was excited to make icing from scratch and as I was pouring the icing sugar into the bowl something hit me: my roommate had already gone to bed. I wasn’t about to assault her sleep with the hand mixer when she had to be at work at 7:30 am. Her room is off of the kitchen; no matter how you slice it, it’s not the nicest thing to do.

I did what I will call resourceful, you may call it what you like. I brought the bowl and the hand mixer into the bathroom and made the icing. Yeah, I wish I hadn’t told you either but this blog is based on honesty and my bathroom is cleaner than the average bathroom.

In the end it was a bit past my usual bedtime, particularly lately because I’m sick, but it was worth the wait.

The cake looked great and the icing worked out well. It was a bit thin which made the cake show in spots but it was edible so I’m chalking that up as a victory.