... and eat it, too!

A person who is retiring should make a transition, rather than an abrupt full-time work, then nothing change of life. As I’ve been both sick for the past 10 days and grading papers, I’ve had on the TV set to provide background noise, sometimes keeping me awake and other times giving me white noise conducive to napping.

My eye has been caught by the food network, the one that has cake decorating challenges. Today, it was 10 top decorators paired with a teammate not of their own choosing, designing and completing a cake in relays. First, one member of each team had an hour, then swapped with the other team member, a rotation that took the first 6 hours of the competition. For the last 2 hours, both team members worked on the final assembling and decorating of the project.

For those who had a plan, the system worked well; for those who didn’t communicate well, it was tense, to say the least. One team did such a poor job of communicating that the next team member redid everything the previous hour had accomplished! Talk about one step forward and two steps backward. For the most part, however, it was amazing to see how the cakes were sketched, carved, stacked, and decorated in record time and with spectacular results.

And I think I’d like to do that.

As I’ve been watching the cake decorating, my mind has been wandering back to that period in my life when I did some cake decorating—and absolutely loved it. I enjoyed designing a cake and then making it come to life, but nothing I ever did was on a scale 1/10 of what the professionals are doing on the TV programs.

The pros use fondant, a taste I’ve never developed, to get the smooth outside of the cake that shows off all the detail added to it. There are layers stacked at crooked angles and all kinds of whirligigs and geegaws added to the cakes, and the results are spectacular. I doubt that I could ever achieve that level of expertise, but I wonder if I could practice and get myself to the level of decorating cakes at Von’s or Albertson’s bakeries?

It’s just a thought, but one I’m going to allow free reign for a while.