Disaster Cake

The pastry that went awry

It was a day after school, in 1978. My brother asked me if I wanted to go into the kitchen to make some coffee cake.

“Of course!” I exclaimed. I learned how to make the cake a year before, in our middle school’s home economics class, which back then, was a required part of the curriculum. My brother was now taking the class and wanted his turn at making the cake for our family. It was time to pass the kitchen baton to him.

This was no ordinary coffee cake. It was pure butter and sugar, with cinnamon crumble topping consisting of more butter, brown sugar, and cinnamon. We couldn’t wait to get started.

We opened the fridge and cupboards, finding and taking out the requisite items to begin.

Our kitchen was small, with limited counter space. On the counter were two bottles of Harvey’s Bristol Cream and a few other items which my brother moved out of the way.

“Put these out of the way for now,” he told me, handing me the bottles of Harvey’s Bristol Cream.

“Okay,” I said, and proceeded to stow them in the oven, as my brother mixed the cake ingredients.

As I was helping with the crumble topping, and without my knowing it, my brother turned on the oven to preheat it.

In short order, we put together the cake.

“Are you ready to preheat the oven?” I asked him.

“It’s already on!” he said.

“Oh God! Oh no!” I said. “The bottles are in the oven!”

“What?!”

“They’re in the oven!”

“What are they doing there?!”

“You told me, get rid of these! I was going to take them out when you were ready to put the cake in! There wasn’t enough room on the table!”

We turned the oven off and waited a few moments. Nothing happened.

Then we opened the oven door.

Bang! was all we heard when the tops of the bottles popped! The sherry exploded all over the oven, all over the floor, the ceiling, the table, the counter, and us!

We no longer thought about the cake — we thought about how to clean up the mess before our parents arrived home from work. I was scrubbing the floor and my brother was wiping down the counters when my parents walked in.

My mother took one look at us and the kitchen and shrieked.

“What happened to this kitchen?”

We explained that we were trying to surprise them with a cake, but we surprised them with a mess. The only thing I remember was her yelling, “Yve, get upstairs! Peter, upstairs! Jake, upstairs!”

There was a small flight of stairs leading from the kitchen to the second floor and our bedrooms. My brother Peter and I went up, with our father following. We didn’t go downstairs for the rest of the evening, and it took my mother a while to remove the sherry stains from everything. There was no dinner. There was nowhere to sit, as sherry was all over the place!

From time to time, my brother and I still laugh about what happened. We never made the cake again, even though it was a great recipe — for disaster.