Lauryn Kenny

A Spoon A Spoon 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 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

Full of Sugar Full of Sugar Full of Sugar By Lauryn Kenny

should’ve started baking earlier instead of late in the afternoon. Our patience finally hit its peak when it reached 11:00 p.m.

“That’s it,” I told them. “I’m not waiting any longer. We are frosting this cake.”

It was a tiring process. We each took turns trying to smack the cake out of the pan so we could frost it. We all gasped as one of the cakes fell apart.

You know what happens when you see your project fail? Denial. When you know that everything is falling apart, your brain tries to think positively. “This can still work,” I tried to tell myself. With a dash of hope and berries, we managed to put the cake back together.

It looked . . . Well, I realize now that it looked stomped on. The cake looked caved in. The decoration was subpar. Not even the strawberries on top could save it. Our baking project was monstrous in every sense of the word. “It looked like a lopsided pile of dirt with fruit embellishments,” Liam says. “In other words, it looked horrendous.”

When we showed the cake to our family, they all had varying degrees of shock on their faces. “They pretended not to notice how ugly it looked so as not to hurt our feelings,” Liam recalls. “We could all sense the insincerity.”

It felt like a stab in the gut. We all worked so hard on this. It took hours to prepare. It was going so well. It hurt to see how the cake had turned out. But, in a shocking turn of events, “It tasted great,” Liam remembers. Even though it looked lopsided, we still managed to make a good piece of cake.

I remember looking at my brothers, covered in chocolate and frosting. Their smiles, while small, were plain to see. It didn’t matter how awful this cake looked. My brothers helped me with this. With all the pain, the struggle, and the stains on our clothing, we all felt closer—and that was exactly what we needed during the pandemic.

“It made us motivated to bake more, to improve. Thus, we started baking every week to varying degrees of success,” Liam says. We baked cookies, cupcakes, brownies, banana bread, and strawberry shortcake. It helped me forget the pandemic for just a few hours. It forced me into the moment instead of the future. With baking, I had a new purpose.

That first day of baking is an experience that I look back on fondly. Most importantly, it helped my brothers and I grow closer. Maybe a lopsided cake baked during a pandemic was the best cake we ever made.