Bundt Cake

Because I didn’t know what to do with my free time yesterday, and because I have family coming over today, and because I like to cook, I decided in the afternoon yesterday to make a bundt cake — my first.  I’ve made angel cakes and regular birthday style cakes before, layered and frosted, but somehow never this, not yet.

I had to actually buy a pan for it as I didn’t have one and the fluted tube cake pan I use for angel cakes isn’t quite the right thing for a bundt — I got an $11 special at Marshalls, a surprisingly decent store to buy random kitchenware shit in, and a fun trip, because there were a million people in the store, doing Christmas returns, shopping the post-holiday clearance sales.  I forget sometimes that it’s fun to get out and look at people around me, just fucking look at them — experience the quirks and weirdness that we all bring to the world together — the dude with the greasy mullet looking at women’s handbags, for example, struck me as interesting — was he shopping for himself or someone else?  Or was he just looking out of pure boredom / curiosity?  Did he see a handbag that reminded him of an old girlfriend?  I didn’t see an obvious partner for him in the store, a girl that might have been with him, but it’s odd for a man to be in such a female-dominated store by himself.  (Says the man in that store by himself.)

After Marshalls I went to the grocery store and bought a few missing cake items:  frozen blueberries for the filling because I decided to do a marbled cake, confectioner’s sugar and cream cheese for frosting.  I went to the gym after that, overheard two people talk about the invasion of socialism in this country and rolled my eyes, wondered if they watched bullshit news like OAN and listened to Q.  It’s a shame, one of the two is a regular, a woman in her mid fifties, and I admire her work ethic, she’s slim and fit, tough to be that at her age.  But that kind of politics I just find… incomprehensibly stupid.   Exercise-wise, I focused on biceps, shoulders, and back.  I set a 2 minute timer between sets and did fifteen of them in my normal routine.  I try not to look in the mirror but when I do I sometimes see two different versions of me.  If I catch myself peripherally, unexpectedly, I look normal — fit — slim waist, wide shoulders, a bit of butt shelf.  But if I look at myself dead on, intentionally, I just see flaws, the slight bulge of my stomach, the shoulders that should be bigger and don’t quite look proportioned to the rest of my body, the forearms I can never seem to grow, my thick eyelids and growing widow’s peak.  It’s better that I don’t look at myself.  It’s better that I look at my phone between sets, doing puzzles, wordle and quordle and NYT crosswords and news articles.  I get home exhausted and power nap for thirty minutes

When I wake up all my motivation is gone.  It’s four o’clock and Jennie will be home in an hour and I have to make dinner and this stupid cake too and my mood is sour.  The excitement I felt about it before abandoned me and I was left with ingredients all over the kitchen table.

I did what I have learned to do when I feel this way:  Try not to think too hard about my mood, try to push those thoughts down, the pointlessness and worthlessness, and drink coffee, move around.  It sort of worked, half an hour later I’m functional, I put a band called Opeth on my phone to listen to, I start to clean the kitchen, and then suddenly my wife Jennie is home unexpectedly, she left work early because of something related to her parents and when she finished whatever that was she decided to just come home.  She’s hungry, so I make dinner a little early:  white rice in the pressure cooker, trader joe’s orange chicken, baked, broccoli, steamed, and a dumpling.  The dumplings are new — we try them, she doesn’t like it, I think they are OK, certainly edible.  I still feel lousy inside and when I see her not finish the dumpling I feel rotten somehow, like I messed up — I’m aware that these are little-kid feelings, some kind of residual responses from when I was a boy and my parents would scold me for doing things wrong or failing to please them — but even though I’m aware of why I have feelings like this, I can’t stop them from coming to the surface once in a while, certain things trigger them.  I clean up and she complains about work and complains about her parents and complains about life in general.  I find this to be astonishing sometimes — her life is so much better than it was three years ago before she met me.  I give her a tremendous amount of love and care.  I married her, we’re working on a kid together.  She’s not lonely, she has support in life.  She can look at her phone and bitch about nonsense while her peripherally attractive husband cleans the kitchen.  That’s a pretty good life, isn’t it?

After I clean I start in on the cake.  It’s an ordeal.  The filling takes half an hour — the blueberries are frozen and must be thawed, then puree’d, then combined with sugar and lemon juice and zest and pectin, then boiled and reduced, then left to cool and set.  It tastes funny to me and I can’t decide if it’s because I used too much pectin or because the Lexapro I’m taking is screwing up my taste buds.  Maybe both, it could be both.  The cake is another forty minutes — four separate bowls, a dry bowl, a butter/sugar bowl, a buttermilk/vanilla/lemon bowl, an egg mixture bowl.  Things get combined in various ways in various proportions, and bit by bit it comes together.  Finally the batter goes into the cake pan, I spread the blueberry filling into a cavity I created down the center like a circular racetrack and randomly swish it around to create the marbling, then into the oven it goes for an hour.

By this point it’s eight.  It bakes for an hour and ten minutes and the house smells incredible.  Jennie initially wondered why I had decided to make a cake — why put yourself through all of this work?  But now, with the smell of it in the air, there are no more questions being asked, just the awareness of cake to come.  When it’s cooling later, at nine thirty, we decide to have a slice even though the instructions say to let it cool for at least an hour and a half before eating.  It’s only been twenty minutes.

She thinks it’s wonderful but to me it tastes metallic, the blueberry filling reminds me of what it tastes like when you put a penny in your mouth.  I tell her I’ve messed it up and she insists it’s great.  And then she looks at me and tells me that she thinks I’m great, that she’s happy with me, so glad to be together.  And I look into her eyes and want to believe her but I can’t.

This is a metaphor for my life.  From the outside it looks absolutely fine — I’m healthy and functional and social and married — I have friends and family, I have things to keep me busy, I’m plugged into the world.

On the inside everything tastes off.