My girlfriend's sister's boyfriend's grandson turned 6 on December 20th. It was my mission to bake him a cake. It's the same chocolate layer cake I've made about five times before. There's definitely a limit to what I can do in the kitchen. Potato skins, damned fantabulous chili, peanut butter cookies (don't let the batter get warm, ever), vanilla cupcakes and chocolate layer cake is just about all I can create in the kitchen. Everything else turns out to suck, really badly suck and then ends up in the garbage.
It took me longer to find the recipe on the internet than it did to make the cake. And that's not because any search for chocolate celebration cake brought up any porn. If you want to find it, just google this "America's Celebration Cake". It should be at the top of the list on wilton dot com.
It's not my favorite cake, but it's pretty decent. That's what everyone seems to think, it's pretty good cake and frosting. The most common comment is that it has chocolate chips in the cake. It gets eaten by everyone who tries it.
The ingredients are awfully common stuff. The chocolate flavoring for the cake is actually flavored from a half bag of chocolate chips, with the rest stirred into the batter. The finished product comes out a lot better than you would expect without any fancy or unusual ingredients. I do refuse to buy clear vanilla, so the middle vanilla frosting isn't snow white.
Frosting the cake is a real challenge for me. Like a "challenged" challenge. The genetics for cake decorating are not in my DNA, but I try. The results are a bit comical. The harder I try, the worse the result. So I do the best I can with the frosting and then seal it up in a plastic cake carrier. Done! Ugly, tasty and done!
What does this have to do with screenwriting? I started to think that my cake should be called the tentpole cake. Then I looked up the definition and wasn't so sure. It looks like my understanding of a tentpole movie was wrong. My thinking was that it is a film that appeals to everyone under the tent, kind of like my chocolate layer cake. Wrong!
Hopefully my skill as a screenwriter pays off somehow, because my baking abilities are severely limited. See, I still want to write just like that chocolate cake. Basic stories without fancy ingredients. The kind of stuff that people like more than they would ever expect from the simple ingredients. Some recent successes really fit that example. Gran Torino, Juno & The Wrestler to name a few. Simple stuff that you can devour many times and still enjoy!
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