My coworker Handy Woman is an incredible baker, and she usually makes
the treats for office birthdays, but she was intrigued by my description of
black magic cake. “You’ll have to make that for the next birthday,” she said,
so we looked at the calendar and determined that the next office birthday was
our boss’s. It didn’t sound like a bad idea two months ago, but as the day grew
closer, I started to get kind of freaked out about baking a cake for my own
boss. Now I make black magic cakes all the time, in all sorts of weird
permutations (like pennies, pigs, and Russian Orthodox churches), but always
for close friends. They don’t mind if my pig is too cute to eat, my portrait of
Abe Lincoln is way too cartoonish, and my Cyrillic alphabet contains suspect
letters like theta. They are especially forgiving of my terrible frosting jobs…
but what would my coworkers think? What would my BOSS think??
Richard Bonomo reminded me that it’s almost impossible to screw up a
black magic cake, since it’s a very simple recipe. Still, mine often have
structural integrity problems that my friends happily overlook, as long as the
cake tastes good. This cake came out in fairly good shape, but then I made the
frosting, stirring it by hand… and the butter didn’t get blended in well enough
so there were white chunks showing in the chocolate frosting. Ugh! It was such
an ugly cake! I brought it to work yesterday anyway, and just before lunch we
all gathered around it, and I sang “Happy Birthday” in Basque to my boss. He is
a very easygoing guy, and he didn’t seem worked up about the ugly cake. I was
afraid Handy Woman would be underwhelmed, but she just seemed happy I made it
from scratch and not a mix. Everyone seemed to enjoy the cake, so maybe my
fears were unfounded. Maybe people really don’t care about how amateurish a
cake looks, as long as it tastes wonderful… and black magic cake always does.
Unless you don’t like coffee – I’ve been told by coffee haters that they can
taste it and it ruins the flavor for them. Fortunately, all my coworkers are
coffee fiends so we all love black magic cake.
Famous Hat
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