Except for January, my monstrous family celebrates a birthday every month. That means a whole lot of birthday cake. Before Vanessa came around, all the older sisters dabbled with the world of careful measurements, timing and temperatures. We had a few successes, but many more failures. I can recall two crowning moments of my own. Once I forgot to add baking powder to a cake—you can imagine the outcome. Another time I added liquid dish soap instead of oil to a recipe. Now before you get all judgy, you should know that our dish soap and vegetable oil came in identical 18-liter aluminum cans. Once the labels identifying the products got wet and peeled off, chances were pretty high that you would at best have to rewash all the dishes, or at worst be serving a diarrhea-inducing dessert.

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