Resourcefulness and the Ugly Birthday Cake

You know usually I put up some sort of information I deem useful. I'm just like that. I'm prone to action rather than much thought (hey, don't take that too far--you know I think occasionally . .). Something happens and I think, "What can I DO about it?" and get busy instead of fretting over this and that and hashing out possible courses of action for too long. I like when things are happening NOW and hate waiting for anything. Anyway, all that aside, I'm posting thoughts today (don't expect them to get too deep) along with a little experience from last weekend (yeah, I'm that far behind).

My daughter's birthday was Sunday, so about Thursday I started thinking about it (did I mention I'm also prone to procrastination?). We had to go over the mountain so I could see yet another doctor on Friday and I took along a long list of things to get at the store. Unfortunately, the Dr appointment ran long and it's 2 1/2 hours one way to get there and we had to get back by 6:00 for a softball barbeque sweet husband had helped plan, so I didn't get much of my list done. Saturday we spent the day fishing with friends, so again I didn't get to the store.

Then Sunday rolled around. Sweet little daughter wanted a 3 layer cake with white frosting. Me and cakes do not get along, but I have pretty good success with cake mixes. On this day, however, I had no cake mix, and I really try not to shop on Sundays (besides the fact that there isn't a store open for 10 miles on Sundays around here), so I opted to use a recipe out of a local recipe book assuming that it would work for my altitude, etc. It sunk so bad it wasn't funny. Now of course I didn't start this project until about 3:00 so I really didn't have time to bake something else, so I cut it up and patched it together and made really the ugliest 3 layer cake I've ever seen. Whew.

Now to frost it. Of course I don't have a can of frosting, so I went to the food room in search of powdered sugar and alas, there was none to be found. (Powdered sugar is one of those "extras" in the food storage, and "extras" haven't been in the budget lately.) Hmmmmmm. How am I supposed to make frosting without powdered sugar??? We surely can't leave the cake looking as ugly as it did--it really did need some sort of covering on it. So I grabbed a cookbook and amazingly found a recipe for frosting that used regular sugar and egg whites (turned out kind of like really sweet meringue). So I whipped up a batch of that and frosted the ugly cake. My daughter was SO pleased to have her 3 layer cake with white frosting, just like she wanted, and I was saved by resourcefulness.

So the birthday cake experience really got me thinking about a couple of things. First, in order to be resourceful, you need some resources. You can't make something out of nothing. If I had no flour, sugar, eggs, good cookbook, etc. I would have had a real hard time making any kind of cake. Resources are also your acquired skills and a bit of creativity. I can't tell you how many times I've been able to "make something up" using skills and information I learned doing something else. Be willing to think outside the box and draw from your resources both physical and mental when faced with a challenge.

Second, it's nice to have the things you need to make what you need to make. It's much harder if you have to improvise certain things. You know, if you need to pound in a nail, wouldn't you rather have a hammer than a rock? It would have been much easier and a lot less time consuming to have pulled out a cake mix and can of frosting and made the cake that way. Or at least had a cake mix--frosting in a can isn't that good. Some things can be improvised if you don't have the tools you need, but some things simply cannot be done without the proper tools. Get the tools you need. Sometimes you don't know the tools you need until you try building/cooking/making, so get busy adding mental and physical resources to your gear.

That's about as deep as it gets around here. :)