I know my way around a kitchen.  I’m a pretty decent cook, if I do say so myself.  And while I’m not one of the great grillmasters of America, I certainly do know how to cook good stuff on the grill, and it’s been a long time since I’ve grilled anything that was charred on the outside and pink on the inside.  My friend K– can attest to the fact that I grill a mean turkey.  And my shrimp jambalaya, while not necessarily to Jennifer’s liking, is purty dang good.

I cannot bake, though.  I have warned people of this.  I have told people that when I make cookies from a package of instant cookie mix — the kind where you simply squeeze the dough onto the pan and bake for a certain amount of time — they end up tasting like soap, no matter how pristine my baking environment is.  When I make pie, the resulting pastry squirms.  When I make cupcakes, mothers threaten their children with them (and the children obey).  And a court order prevents me from ever again approaching brownie mix; parts of Davis are still uninhabitable.

People think I’m kidding.  I’m not.

For our Halloween potluck tomorrow at work I promised to bring the famous kitty litter cake that I brought two years ago and that was such a hit.  The plan was originally to wait for Jennifer to come home from rehearsal, and then she’d bake the cake.  I thought I’d be a good husband — it’s my office, after all — and bake the cake before she arrived so that all that would be left would be to crumble up the cake with the pudding and the cookie bits and mix it all up together in a fresh, clean litterbox.

So, I had two packages of Duncan Hines cake mix: one white, one spice.  I mixed the ingredients — the cake mix, the eggs, the oil, the water — exactly as specified on the box.  I blended them, I beat them for exactly two minutes, as specified on the packages.  I stuck them in the oven, noting carefully the size of the pans and how long I should bake the cakes given the fact that I was using two pans approximately 8″ on a side.  Set the oven to exactly the temperature specified in the directions.

When the timer goes off, what do I have?

Two pans of…  something.  I’m not sure what to call it.  They roughly resemble cake in that they smell like cake and are in cake pans.  However, they have swollen up dangerously, and they… wobble.  When I move them, their surfaces jiggle in a way that can’t possibly be right for something that is supposed to be more or less solid all the way through.  There are waves.  I took a toothpick and stuck it in through the top of the bulge and pulled it out, and it came out dripping of uncooked cake batter.  The bulge sort of popped.  I swirled the toothpick around and watched the liquid batter pool up through the wound in the cake’s skin.

Hm, I thought.  Fascinating.

I figured okay, the cakes just aren’t finished baking.  So I put them back in the oven, figuring, oh, what the hell, another ten minutes should take care of it.

Ten minutes go by.  I take the cakes out.  They still wobble, the toothpick still comes out dripping; the only difference is that now the surface of the cake is burned at the edges.

Something, somewhere, doesn’t want me to ever bake.  Ever.  People think I am simply making excuses when I say I don’t bake; they think I’m trying to pawn off the chore onto my wife.  This evening’s fiasco proves, I think, that I am not.

I can grill steaks and fish and burgers so that they’re perfect on both the outside and on the inside.  I find it ironic that I just can’t do the same with a simple cake mix.