Reindeer Poop

'Tis the season of school Christmas parties. Tomorrow there are three - one in E's class at school, one at the girls' nursery school and one at their daycare with Amy. All three required a contribution from me for the festivities... I signed up for dessert because it's often cheaper, faster, easier and I'm cheap and lazy like that. Boxed brownies are cheap, and hard to screw up... so I thought. We had two boxes at home so on my way from work today I picked up one more box of brownies, some festive sprinkles, oil. As soon as I got home I started by dumping all three boxes in one bowl and multiplying the oil, water and eggs to see how much I needed. One quarter of a cup times three boxes is 3/4 a cup of oil. I poured it in the measuring cup, then dumped it in the mix seconds before I realized that I had misread the cup and had poured in ONE and 3/4 cup of oil. Fuck. Steve assured me that it would be fine, mix it up, don't add as much water, bake it longer, no sweat. And off he went to basketball. I read to the boys while it baked and raced down when the timer went off - no where NEAR baked. I added another 20 minutes and, fighting back tears, called the bakers I knew... Kate thought my situation was dire. Melissa wasn't home. My parents didn't have any suggestions. By the time I was on the phone with Nancy, I had declared the greasy, crumbly brownies a failure and moved on.


We took an inventory of what I had to work with and realized there was very, very little. I had some cake mix, but not enough eggs. Good ol' google. I found a page that told you how to substitute soda for eggs and had some cranberry pop left over from PJ's party. That would be a good colour for Christmas! I had mini cupcake tins, that would be good for sharing at parties... I started over, mixed the cake, added the soda, greased the pans and felt almost hopeful.


When the cakes were ready, I took them out, let them cool and tried to pry them out of the tin. The tops came right off in a cookie shape. The bottoms crumbled in the pan itself. By this time I was on the phone with Melissa who suggested "cake balls"; crumble the cake and mix it with icing, roll into balls, dip in melted chocolate and refridgerate to set. Um, no chocolate, but I did have crumbly cake and icing. I dug in up to my elbows, mixed the cake with the icing and rolled away... crumbly pink cake, brown chocolate icing, rolled into sticky, lumpy balls... it looked kinda like shit. Literally. By this point I had reached Steve on his way home from practice and asked him to stop in the store to buy some peanut free cookies.


At Melissa's suggestion, I rolled the sticky balls in the sparkly sprinkles. Now I had sparkly turds. Good thing a mascot of the season is a large, magical deer with pellet shaped excrement. I tried one and it's not terrible. It's way too sweet with the berry cake and the chocolate icing, but it's not bad - I think the kids may actually like it. I'm going to have to admit defeat and send the boxed cookies with Elliot to school, as there are not enough Turds for all three parties, but I think I may risk embarrasment and present the Turds at the two daycare parties... we'll see how I feel about it tomorrow.

N