A Spoon COVID-19 is difficult for everyone—especially for someone living with eight people. But the family that bakes together stays together. They say practice makes perfect, but after multiple baking mishaps, that seems unlikely. Add seven family members to the mix, and you have a disaster waiting to happen. I am a busybody. Always have been, always will be. Whether it is going out with friends or staying busy with school, I can never sit still. COVID-19 hit like a ton of bricks, and doing my normal hobbies became impossible. How was I, a lonely 20-year-old with nothing but
12
BURST
time on my hands, going to handle the simultaneous isolation and continuous noise from the other people I live with? How was I going to survive? The answer struck me one day. As I was scoping out my kitchen, wondering what I could do with all of this time, I realized I wanted to make a cake. Right then. I went downstairs and dragged my brothers away from their afternoon nap to make the best chocolate cherry cake in existence. My brothers, tired and obviously not awake yet, walked to the kitchen. I have no idea why I wanted to make this cake with my brothers. I never baked a cake before. My brothers never showed a big interest in baking. Why should they want to bake now? “I wanted to make the cake because I just like to bake. Cakes are one of my favorite desserts to make,” says my 20-year-old brother Liam. First, we had to look for a recipe. It took some research and arguing, but the perfect recipe finally
arrived at our fingertips. It was the Devil’s Food Cake recipe from the Food Network. Not only did the recipe look easy, but the cake looked fantastic. Perfect, I thought. What could go wrong? It was pretty simple at first. We added the dry ingredients in one bowl. The hardest part was stirring the milk. To make sure the milk doesn’t scald, one person had to whisk the milk at all times. While I was mixing the milk and water, Colin and Liam worked on the wet ingredients. Then, with determination, we added the cherries. Everything seemed to be going well. In fact, it was going perfectly. We did what the recipe told us to do. We made the buttercream frosting with ease. We worked well together. Upon reflection, the Kenny family has one fatal flaw: our impatience. We can’t wait for anything. When the cakes were finished, we took them out of the oven and let them cool. But we got bored quickly. Maybe we should’ve waited a bit longer. Maybe we
