CAKE, YO.

strap in, kids.

today i'm blogging about cake.

and my experiences with cake. and how much i love cake.

you know, when it comes to loving things, honestly, i feel like i'm totally over the top. and sometimes i think it's hard to discern between if i love something, or if i love something.

like, i love the lion king. i'm listening to the soundtrack right now. i spent nearly a hundred american dollars to see it on broadway when i was in london last month.

and if you know me well, you know that i watch the movie, quite literally, three times a day if i have the chance.

i love cake, but i don't love cake that much.

at my college, alma college, we have one major cafeteria, which we call saga. (it's not saga. but it was saga when my mom went there many moons ago. so it's saga.)

let's just say... their desserts are... sketch. except their cookies.

SAGA COOKIES FOR ALL.

but whenever saga has cake, i get rullll excited.

like, sometimes i'll slam my hands down on the table. i'll clap really enthusiastically. i jump up dramatically and yell CAKE! i'll squeal. or make high pitched whistling noises.

i am completely serious. there is no better dessert. except chocolate covered strawberries. that is the bamf of desserts.

when people ask me why i get so excited about cake, this is usually my answer. and i say it dramatically, normally with a little hint of fake drunk.

"you see, cake is happiness. i do not see them as two separate things. it's not just like, an awkward simile or metaphor. cake actually IS happiness."

and then i'll run to the dessert table and get cake.

sometimes saga cake is delicious.

but most of the time it's dry. and i end up disappointed.

one time the cake was mint. i don't like mint. but the frosting, i swear to god, was colgate. ACTUAL COLGATE. it was the same colour. it had the same consistency. and it tasted like freakin' colgate.

obviously i made everyone around me try it.

also, there was this cake.

IT HAD ABSOLUTELY NO DISCERNIBLE FLAVOUR. I MEAN, JEEEEEZ. NOTHING.

so saga cake is sketch. but that doesn't mean that i don't totally go nuts over it like i'm expecting the best cake of my life.

my whole life i've liked cake. my mom is relatively crafty, and she's been making me really sweet birthday cakes since... well... i guess since i was old enough to ask for them.

for a few years it wasn't cool to have a really awesome birthday cake. like, for my fifth birthday i had these really sweet ballet slippers, and one time i had a car, and when i was fifteen i had this really bitchin' fishbowl, but after that, i went through that "i'm too cool for awesome cakes" phase.

i did that when i was in elementary school when i didn't think it was cool to have my mom make my clothes anymore.

i regret that nearly every day of my semi-adult life.

but for my twentieth birthday i had a snitch. a SNITCH. like, a golden snitch from harry potter. and i wanted it to float, just like harry's coming of age birthday cake.

it didn't float. my parents are biologists and chemists, not physicists.

my twenty-first birthday i was most excited about. i mean, it's my twenty-first. it has to be epic.

SO IT WAS A LION KING CAKE, YO.

CHECK THAT SUCKA OUT.

my twenty-first birthday also involved homemade macaroni and cheese (my birthday always does) and when i blew out my candles, my grandfather turned to me and said, "happy fourth birthday, emily!"

oh, i forgot to mention. my eighteenth birthday was a STEGOSAURUS.

I KNOW, RIGHT?

for my twenty-second birthday, which was last week, my mom made me a really awesome fish. she found a picture of it in parade magazine and showed it to me sometime over spring break, and i was like, yeah that looks pretty legit.

i hadn't given my cake much thought. and i like goldfish. at first i thought she was reminding me of my beloved goldfish that died after spring term of my sophomore year, but she just wanted to make it for my birthday.

so she did. and it was really sweet. but it only had one fin. when i expressed this concern, my mother got all flustered and said, "well, there wasn't enough cake to make the other fin, and the picture only had one fin. we'll just call him nemo, okay?"

mother. right in the childhood.

now, this is not a joke, what i'm about to tell you. the day before my birthday, we celebrated with my grandpa. so my mom is sticking candles into the spine of the fish and she's making sure that she has twenty-two of them and i'm trying to take a kick-ass instagram picture, and my brother, bless his soul, leans forward and says, with his awe-inspiring college degree in biology:

"did you intentionally make it a freshwater fish?"

I SHIT YOU NOT.

this is my boss instagram picture, by the way.

nemo is obviously a freshwater fish. 

i mean, i guess it is. i'm getting an english degree. probably so i can work in fast food.

but the point of this part of the blog is that i like cake, and my mom makes me kickass birthday cakes. 

and she should teach me. so i can make myself kickass birthday cakes when i live alone in an apartment and have an evil cat to keep me company while i wonder when i'll ever meet a nice person to settle down with and pop out babies.

just kidding. i have more important life drives.

the second part of this post still has to do with cake. and it goes something like this.

my RA staff and i decided that we were going to have a food challenge for a staff fun night. on willard's porch. (willard is my fabulous hall director. like, he's the best.) and he has a video camera. and we all go to walmart and buy the supplies that we need.

cinnamon challenge. some kind of weird chilean pepper challenge. the saltine challenge.

i'm not food adventurous. in england, christina yelled this at me in the middle of a tea shop across from shakespeare's birth home: "YOU HAVE THE PALATE OF A CHILD."

but while i was thinking of a food challenge, i remembered how much i just really love cake and how cake is equivalent to happiness, and then someone mentioned matilda.

if you've seen matilda, you know where this is going.

if you don't, this really large kid eats an entire chocolate cake that's actually the size of like, EIGHT chocolate cakes, and it looks delicious but he eats the entire thing with his hands and it was one of the more traumatic cinematic parts of my childhood.

so we went to walmart and got a chocolate cake and i had to eat it with my hands.

now, nighttime falls. we're on willard's porch. i'm going last. so i'm watching as my fellow staff members are like, snorting cinnamon and half puking over willard's porch railing. and then willard puts this store-bought little walmart cake in front of me and he gives me a big apron.

and i dug into that chocolate cake with both hands.

a lot of people boast about double fisting their drinks at frat parties.

well, i double fist walmart chocolate cake.

it wasn't, and yet, totally was, as bad as i expected. like, the first half of the cake was pretty decent. i had cake in places i never thought i'd get cake. and i had a huge glass of milk, which was incredibly helpful, but seriously, i had frosting up to my elbows. and i had my loving staff cheering me on.

but once i got halfway through that cake, oh lord, my stomach. i couldn't finish it, quite obviously. i mean, it was an entire chocolate cake. the rest of my staff helped out. all hands. 

i almost showered after that incident. and honestly, i did not want cake for a really, long time.

i've never been in what normal people call a sugar coma, but that night, when i got back to my dorm room, i spouted gibberish to jacob, my then boyfriend, and then i laid down on my bed, tried not to puke, and physically shook with excess sugar. 

i told myself i wasn't going to eat cake for a really long time. like, a really long time.

two weeks later i was in the hospital for seizures. non-cake related, but now i'm thinking there might be a coincidence.

while i was chillin' in room 4004, i got to order room service for food, which was ironically cooked by the same company that cooks alma's food. (spoiler alert, the hospital food was better.) and of course, they had chocolate cake.

the third of my five nights in the hospital, i was eating chocolate cake.

i wrote on my staff's facebook to let them know.

"GUISE I'M EATING CHOCOLATE CAKE THIS IS NOT A DRILL"

or something to that effect. 

you know, i'm not sure how to end this post.

i just really love cake, okay? 

this actually all came about because my grandma's birthday is on monday, and mine was last monday, and we celebrated by having a big bakery cake at my house today, and my facebook status was this:

"FAMILY SHENANIGANS! THIS WILL BE ME."

and it soooooo was.