Cakewalk

It wasn’t the most perfect cake – so many of the others were a Betty Crocker spectacle, with perfect brown sugar and coconut German Chocolate caramel on top or hidden layers of whipped cream and dark bing cherries under their smooth chocolate surface and scalloped fudge frosting…

But not my mother’s cake: hers was as completely unorthodox as she was: a shock of pink frosting cresting in miniature waves with crazy trees and imagined small woodland creatures: a buck deer, a squirrel, a pair of chickadees all handmade out of stiffer frosting and painted with food coloring and toothpicks to look like as much like the real thing as possible, all dancing about their icing forest, along with a carpet of sugar snowflakes.

And so, as it sat among the dozen other cakes that had been donated for the elementary school carnival cake walk, it drew a crowd: dazzled children as well as secretly jealous fellow bakers, wondering perhaps why the crowd wasn’t as taken by her spice cake, with cinnamon sprinkles and artistically placed gumdrops just so, or another why her pyramid of cupcakes didn’t draw those in search of novelty among the more pedestrian contenders.

My mother wasn’t there to see the attention her entry demanded, as she was off helping to run the fishing derby where kids cast strings with a clothes pin on one end over a paper mâché wall where the waiting adults attached a small prize to each and gave the line a tug telling the fishers that their line was ready to pull back in.

I, on the other hand, was fixated on bringing that cake home again: it was one thing to watch it spring to life, but another to actually get the whole thing to oneself. I strategized how to be in the right place in line to have a shot at it when it came time for it to be the next prize and managed to be one of the eight contestants when the music started.

I didn’t win the cake – I sat down in chair number seven but the carboard wheel of fortune landed on number six; I wandered a bit to console myself and caught sight of my mother running the fishing derby in Mr. Ellsworth’s classroom, her youth and joy and creativity things that have endured far, far after the night I almost won her cake.