high-bar baking

I think about the Hemingway line every time I give blood:

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

(Attribution is debated on that line. For the purposes of my life, it is much easier to say “Hemingway” than “Hemingway or any of the other people who possibly said it even though everyone just attributes it to Hemingway.) 

It’s been too long. It’s time I sat down and bled. 

I told you about the chocolate cake competition I was going to partake in. It happened on Monday. I lost. 

There, is that so bad?

Um, yes? You’d have to work real hard at football score-igami to come up with the final tally of 15-6, and I can’t quite use my favourite word and call it a shellacking. But I got whooped. It wasn’t close. My coworker tactfully didn’t reveal the final score to the voting public, but I’m telling you. It matters. I wasn’t two votes away from dominance. I was handily put down. 

Even if my old teammate told me he voted for mine. “I’m not a frosting guy,” he said. Even if my friends referred to it as a Shakespearean tragedy. Even if everyone I’ve told has been adorably irate and flabbergasted on my behalf. 

Still lost. 

And that’s the trouble with the sport; it’s subjective. No hoops, no goalposts, no end zones. “Which one did you like better?” And they were wildly different cakes, is what I tell myself. Hers was thin cake layers between thick, fudgy stripes of frosting. Like one of those solid block, skinny, tall slices at a steakhouse. Mine was cake. Two big chunks and chocolate cream cheese thinly spread between. Not too sweet. 

We split hairs at this level, of course. I tried hers. It was great. It was a great chocolate cake. I didn’t lose to no slouch. 

But at the end of the day, I still liked my cake better. I’m telling my bruised hubris that that’s what matters.