One of my classes has a “snack” feature, which involves students taking turns bringing in a snack for the class. It’s a large class so usually there are 2 or 3 students bringing something in. Since I love to bake, and there are only two of us at home to eat, this seemed like a good thing.

Tuesday was my day to bring the snack. I decided over the weekend to make a cake on Monday night, because most of my homework was done and I’d have time. Turns out I misjudged the homework and I didn’t have cake ingredients at home anyway. So after finishing homework I trudged to the grocery store at 9:00 p.m. to get cake stuff. Arriving at home laden with cocoa and eggs, pudding and sour cream (sounds good, right?) I commenced to cake baking. The thing went in the oven at 10:00 and had to remain there for an hour. I’m already past my bed time, but I managed to stay awake until it came out of the oven, but it was too hot to turn out of the pan. So I thought I’d just lay down for a bit…..

At 4 a.m. I woke and realized the cake was still “cooling” in the pan. DRATS. I got up, began working on getting it out of the pan in one piece. Bruce (husband) who works nights was on the computer and wanted to know what in the world I was doing up at 4 working on a cake. Especially when he found out it wasn’t for him. Finally got the cake out of the pan and looking good about 4:30. Went back to bed, perchance to dream.

Alas, no dreaming, and no sleeping either. I should have just stayed up. By 6 I was moving (slowly) around getting ready. It was raining. I left late. US 23 was a nightmare with several accidents along the way. South of 96 we never moved faster than 35 or 40 miles an hour. Just prior to M14 the speed finally picked up. I glanced down at the clock on the dash, how late was I going to be? I still had a 1/2 hour bus trip from the parking lot to campus. And snack class started at 9!

I looked back up from the clock to realize that all the brake lights on all the cars were bright red. And I was moving too fast. I slammed on the brakes, avoided the car in front of me by screeching into the lane on my right. Thank goodness that was empty. Meanwhile, the shoulder bag with the laptop flew off the passenger seat and landed square on top of the bag with the cake.

No time to worry about cake. Or crumbs as it likely was now. Traffic was terrible. We inched our way to Plymouth Road where I got off, finally making it to the commuter lot. The bus was there. I couldn’t take time to investigate the state of the cake, so I grabbed it and ran through the rain.

I arrived at class on time. Amazing. I put my lumpy tinfoil covered offering on the table and went to drop off the devious laptop bag. Since class hadn’t started I went back and peeked under the tinfoil. AMAZING. The cake was shorter than it would normally be, but pretty intact!

Turns out grad students will eat chocolate cake regardless of the physical shape of it! It was gone within 5 minutes of our 10 minute break. I never even ate a piece of it.

The moral of the story is: Don’t put the cake on the floor and the laptop on the seat.