here, try my cake balls

One of the funniest things I’ve ever read on the internet is an excerpt from this post by the very funny Mimi Smartypants. Here it is:

I baked some muffins and brought them into work, and from the reaction I got you would have thought I had shown up wearing a puffy-paint sweatshirt and spreading the gospel of Jesus. There is a place where we put up-for-grabs food in this office, and the woman who sits near that place says that all day she heard constant incredulity, “Mimi made these? Mimi? Our Mimi? She bakes?” This irritated me. Fuck all y’all, I can bake. You want a piece of me? You want to make some motherfucking cookies? Let’s go, right now. Bring the Crisco. BRING IT.

I’m actually glad I finally used that in a post because I think about it a lot and want to look it up so then I start Googling the parts I remember, such as “our mimi she bakes” and, anyway, Ms. Smartypants surely thinks I am a nutso stalker. Now I can nutso stalk my own website instead of hers.

So anyway. Most of my coworkers have functioned for years under the mistaken impression that I don’t know how to cook or bake. This is totally untrue. I can cook and bake just fine, thank you. What it is, is that I’m lazy, and don’t feel like it. So I order takeout. I live by myself (usually). I can do that.

But then several months ago I found myself in a fit of boredom and I decided to try out baking and see how it felt. I made some chocolate chip cookies and some phenomenal almond sugar cookies, and I took most of them to work, and got a reaction much like Mimi’s up there. “Lorie made these? She bakes?” I think they expected the cookies to taste like socks and be frosted with cat hair, and in all honesty, I feared they would too, but they didn’t. They were awesome, and I finally got to understand the joy of making yummy things for other people. So then I went for the gold and decided to try a recipe I’d stumbled across on my lovely internet.

The recipe, which you can find here, is for “red velvet cake balls.” I made them, and they were freaking amazing. The recipe yielded dozens, so I split them up and took some to Family Headquarters and the rest to work. I felt weird about going around at work asking people to try my cake balls, so I decided to market them as cake bites instead.

And the cake bites were a phenomenal success. My coworkers were passing them out to random people walking by, and so people I didn’t even know were complimenting them. It was kind of fun. My family also loved the cake bites, and my Nanie asked for the recipe so she could make them for an Easter gathering.

Nanie reported back to me later that the bites were such a huge hit that one of the attendees asked her for the recipe, and that person made them and entered them in a dessert contest at the hospital where she works, and she won first prize. And I thought, “oh DUDE, faculty/staff picnic!”

So I decided I’d enter the cake bites in the dessert contest at our annual picnic. Since I’m pretty much a non-joiner and also a lazy baker, I’ve never even considered entering the contest before, but I thought I had a good chance of winning this year. I even did a bunch of advance marketing, telling everyone I knew that I was making them and they were awesome and blah blah blah. So the cake bites were highly anticipated. And then I was out late on Tuesday night and ended up getting started on them at about 9:30pm, which means I finished around 3 in the morning. I SLAVED over those bites, people, because I had talked them up so much I had to follow through. I even bought a pretty tray to serve them on.

I made a hundred cake bites and took them in yesterday to be judged. I was sure I’d win something – maybe not first prize, though that would rock, but at least third. So I told all my coworkers that if I didn’t win, I was going to quit my job.

Which means I should be packing up my office right about now.

All the signs seemed promising. They ran out within the first 30 minutes of the picnic, my spies on the ground said they heard people talking about them, and the people I saw raved about how great they were. So they began to announce the winners, and once they’d announced third and second places, I started to get a little excited. Maybe I really would win!

…and then I didn’t.

All the winners were stupid people who made stupid cakes, like big freaking whoop, and enter the same stupid cakes in the same stupid contest every stupid year. I thought for sure I’d have at least the third-best dessert. All the cake bite fans assured me that the contest was rigged, the judges were biased, and that I’d surely won the popular vote, though the popular vote matters exactly as much here as it does in presidential elections.

I decided I’d make the cake bites only for those who would truly appreciate them. Next year, instead of spending six hours slaving over cake bites for random ungrateful strangers, I’ll sit back and eat my lunch and watch the cake-bakers win, and be generally far too cool for lame dessert contests. Though this is not always true, in this case being far too cool for it all takes way less time and energy than going for it, and I may even get a full night’s sleep. Imagine that!