Many years ago, I stumbled upon a website. A website about cake. I gazed upon
pages and pages of intricately frosted cakes, each done over the course of
hours by a paid professional with extensive training.

And I thought, “I could totally do this.”

I had never frosted a cake before. And yet, in one night, I was convinced that
the only things holding me back were apathy and lack of a cake.

By the next day, both barriers had been surmounted. I actually convinced my family
to buy me an oversized cookie (practically a cake). Apparantly they realized that
no matter how horribly I did at frosting, we would still wind up eating cake.

For the design, I had decided to frost a Pokeball, the symbol of one of my favorite
franchises. A ball, half red and half white, with a black stripe and a white button
in the middle. There’s not much room for error there.

Not much. Still some.

I positioned the tube of red icing. This was it. This was my first step into the vast
and beautiful world of cake frosting. Sliding the icing down the middle of the cookie,
I drew a line of red icing. My first stroke. And then, not seconds later, I heard
my Granny call from the living room:

“Don’t put frosting on the entire thing!”

…

“It won’t taste as good that way.”

…

This was bad.

But this wasn’t the end. This was fixable. With a toothpick and some precision, the
excess icing could come off near seamlessly. Like nothing ever happened. No big deal.

Or at least, it wouldn’t have been a big deal if I had known about the toothpick thing.

Instead I wiped it off with a paper towel.

This went as well as can be expected. When I lifted the paper towel, there was a blurry
red line stained permanently down the middle of the cookie. No one would blame me for
giving up there-but I didn’t.

I frosted a smaller Pokeball below the blurry line, and it actually turned out pretty
well. So, I had a cookie-cake with a somewhat decent, off-center Pokeball, a blurry
red line, and a barren and empty top half. That’s the frosting diasaster this whole
story has been leading up to…right?

Wrong. From the moment I frosted the Pokeball down beneath the line, I had a plan.
I was going to take the line and re-use it, adding something that hadn’t been in
my mental design schematic. Text. I was going to put text at the top of the cake,
so the stain would underline it.

It was actually a pretty clever plan…except for one thing. I was out of red frosting.
I had used it all on the smaller Pokeball and the line itself. So the text would have
to be in an entirely different color than its outline. But it was better than nothing.
I scavenged the tube of purple icing from the cabinet and pressed on.

I wrote half of the text. The purple didn’t look too out of place with the red, and
the layout was really coming together. It seemed like I had bounced back from my
mistake, and could emerge from this situation with a decent cake after all.

Then the purple icing ran out.

I should have given up. Even if I still held on to even one shred of hope that I
had when all of this began, one twinge of belief that I held an undiscovered command
over frosting, I should have at least acknowledged how badly the forces of luck had
beaten me down.

But I couldn’t if I wanted to. I grabbed the green icing, continuing the text in
a different color than the previous letters, which were a different color than
the underline below them. It ran out in minutes. But I couldn’t give up. Not with
a quarter of the sentence still unfinished and a cabinet full of mostly-depleted
frosting tubes. I had to pull through. I had to.

But in my heart, I knew that this was it. Bowing out of my frosting career gracefully,
I wiped away the text and left the cookie as is.

So, essentially, I had a cookie-cake with a small, off-center Pokeball at the bottom,
a fuzzy red line stained down the middle, and (since I had used purple and green for
the text) a shape at the top that resembled a blurry eggplant.

We all ate the cookie, so at least one thing turned out well.

It did, in fact, taste better on the areas without frosting.