Past Life Regression

Once upon a time in a former life, I attended The Culinary Institute of Canada in Charlottetown. While there, I learned a multitude of skills all related to the pastry chef trade. I made bread with a vengeance, I churned out huge volumes of lemon curd, pastry creme and raspberry coulis. I learned during one excruciating slide show about fruit. All fruit. Every fruit that could be listed in a Power Point presentation. For those of you not aware, that equals a tremendous amount of fruit and one really long nap.

One of the things that sticks with me most was the week we spent with a bag of piping jelly, rolls of parchment paper and a couple of templates. Our mission? Pipe. Dump that absurdly coloured apricot jelly into a bag with a tiny hole at one end and squeeze it into some semblance of a design. Our Chef Instructor was some kind of hard core. We couldn’t lay down our piping bags until we could produce at least eleventy-hundred IDENTICAL twirly shapes. He mocked us and said that if we could not pipe we might as well be writing “Happy Birthday” on cakes at Dairy Queen. Gasp! Surely not. And so we piped.

A few years later and I am attempting to put myself through teachers college. “I’ve got mad piping skillz”, I think. And where do the best of the best go when they want to do a little piping? Not Dairy Queen, oh no, that’s for amateurs and sissies. I took my mighty case of Piper’s Elbow right into the bakery department at a local chain grocery store. I was the fastest cake decorator the President has ever seen. People would gather to watch me line ‘em up and slap on the non-dairy edible topping. They’d thrill as I made icing flowers and sprinkled cakes with technicolour dragees! Ooh!

Obviously, I couldn’t be there twenty four hours a day to write “Happy Birthday Norm” or “Showers of Happiness Susan” on every cake that came through the place. In theory, every person who worked in the bakery had to possess a small amount of piping skill. Enough to eke out a meager “Congrats” when the regular cake decorator was enjoying a gin and tonic and a night out.

There was one guy. His piping was abysmal. The worst (and also most hilarious) part was that instead of dumping his duds into the trash, he’d line them up in the fridge so we could all have a good laugh the next day. Sometimes I’d walk into the store, taking tally of what I would need to bring the cake counter up to snuff remarking that we must have had a crazy run on cakes last night. Someone sure had a lot of birthdays yesterday. Yuk yuk. But then, I’d walk into the cooler and see twelve cakes lined up with Hapy BirthDay, or Happ Birthda barely contained on the top of the cake. Misspellings, sloppy pipemanship, random misfires from the piping bag – all the night’s carnage was right there on display.

Tonight I came across Cake Wrecks. Perhaps it takes a hardened piper to appreciate some of the nightmares,  but this stuff could not be made up. Pure cake decorating gold!