Doubting Thomas

Things I learned from Thomas the Train.

1. Pound cake is very, very heavy. Not even dowels and wood planks help. Adding 5 tubes of decorative frosting makes pound cake even heavier.

2. Cake from a box is NOT heavy. (Can you see where I’m going?)

3. My husband is not the most gentle of drivers. Remember the episode of the Brady Bunch when Greg and Marcia were bragging about being a better driver than the other, and they set up the egg on the pylon test in their driveway? The object was to get as close to the pylon, even touching it, without breaking the egg. Let’s just say I’m pretty sure Doug’s egg would have broken.

4. Sometimes things on that are pretty and look almost perfect on the outside are gooey and raw and not done in the middle. In other words, don’t judge a book by its cover. Or in this cake, don’t judge a cake by its frosting!

5. Sometimes really messy, crumbly, unplanned things are much better than other things you spend hours on.

6. Thomas doesn’t like being in a car for an hour on a 95 degree day. Even with air conditioning.

7. Once Thomas leaves the tracks, there’s no saving him.

8. Take pictures of anything you’re proud of before anyone else sees or touches it.

9. Always have a plan B; in this case, Mom’s homemade coconut cream pie.

10. You can think you want something really, really bad, wait a long time for it, and then when you can actually have it, it just doesn’t matter.

Yes, as you may have surmised, Thomas had an accident. We decided it would be cute to make another (regular) cake and put Thomas in the middle of it, and make train tracks on either side of him, so it looked like he was going down the rails. Doug put some dowels in the cake, and a wooden plank-platform thingy under Thomas to support him. Did I tell you pound cake is really heavy??

Well, we made it to M-222 and US 131. Turned left onto the on ramp, and over went Thomas the Train. Because the cake underneath it was so soft and fresh and lovely, it just disintegrated. There was no righting Thomas. By the time we got to my sister’s house in Coopersville, there was almost nothing left of the cake underneath Thomas…it was like it had just disintegrated.

Thomas still looked okay from one side, so we concentrated on that side. Jacob was practically foaming at the mouth. He had been staring at this cake for 3 days now, and had been so very patient. He even managed to eat about 6 almonds before demanding cake.

I cut into Thomas…thinking I was kind of glad he fell over, because if he had still been all pretty I might have had a hard time! The first piece went to my baby boy…who took one bite and promptly said, “No thank you.” Well, at least he’s polite. I tried it…it was really dry. Then, about another inch and a half in, it was nice and moist. THEN, it was like a bundt cake. Remember those? The ring cakes that usually had some kind of ooey, gooey, pudding like filling in them? Um, yah. That was the inside of Thomas. It was literally oozing out. All that work. Gone in an instant.

So, other than the ten lessons above, I learned this one too:

Next year, we’re getting cake from Costco!