A few years ago, on a Friday, Tim G., the boss of everything out here, was off work. But, being Tim, and being the boss of everything, he never goes anywhere that he doesn’t call into the office every 15 minutes or so, and that Friday was no different. So, he had called in to talk to a couple of the engineers down the hall, and they had him on speaker phone, and up loud enough for the whole office to hear him. In the background you can hear a cat just yowling and howling, as if it were being slowly and painfully tortured. Seems that Tim was on his way to his daughter’s school with the cat (Alley The Cat) for show and tell. And Tim hates this cat. The only reason this cat still lives and breathes is because this daughter does not hate the cat, his daughter loves the cat. So much so that she'd talked her daddy into bringing her to the school for show and tell. Anyway, we all gathered around to hear Tim trying to deal with the cat running amok in the car, the old lady who can’t drive in front of him, while at the same time try to hold a conversation regarding some very technical engineering-type stuff. Finally, he gets to the school and says that he’ll call back after show n’ tell to continue the conversation. Everyone at the office goes back to work.
45
minutes later, Leslie, the Environmental Engineer is
heard cackling and screaming with laughter.
I head down the hall to see what in the world is going on. Leslie’s son happened to be in Tim’s
daughter’s class, so Tim had decided to call her and let her in on the tragedy
first. It seems that Alley The Cat did
very well during show n’ tell. She
didn’t even seem to mind all of the grubby little first-grader hands all over
her, brushing her fur the wrong way, patting her head (dogs like head-patting,
cats do not) squealing and giggling as first grade children are want to do. Tim was very
surprised; he had not thought that the “ignorant beast” would do quite so well
in this situation. (Tim’s just not a cat
person at all.) But, pleasantly
surprised by how well the cat had behaved, he scoops ol’ Alley The Cat up and
heads back out to the car. When he gets
about halfway down the school corridor, he feels Alley tense and relax, tense
and relax, tense and relax. Then he
hears a chorus of wee little kindergarten voices (they have come to the doorway
of their classroom to see the kitty as she’s carried past) shriek, “Oooo,
yuck! Ga-rossss!” He turns around, and sees, not a
trail of bread crumbs, but you guessed it, a trail of kitty ka-ka. By the time Tim gets to the part of how he
has to hand Alley The Cat over to the principal so that he can begin clean-up,
Leslie has him back on the speaker phone and we’re all rolling around,
clutching our sides and making little snorty noises, we’re laughing so
hard. Tim basically is trying to
handle all of this with aplomb, but the interjected 4-letter words are spoiling
it quite a bit. Finally, he gets off the
phone so that we, his staff of college-educated engineers, can pull ourselves back together… he’ll call us
back in a little while.
Well, as
we're TRYING to compose ourselves, I suddenly remember something my friend
Annette had told me about a few months ago.
Around Halloween, we had a mutual friend throwing a Halloween party. Annette had found this cake recipe that she
wanted to take to the party, but she was afraid that she’d go through all of
the effort to make it, and then it wouldn’t be eaten. The cake was called a Litter Box Cake. I was on the phone at once to start her
digging for the recipe. I knew that I could
pull of making the cake because the people here will eat anything.
So, I bet
you’re all wondering how to make this wonder of culinary delight… Well, here is
the recipe:
First you
bake one white sheet cake (Buy a cake mix and just follow the directions) and
one German Chocolate or spice sheet cake (I used a German Chocolate cake
mix). Let those cakes cool. Then you mix up one large package of vanilla
pudding and put it in the fridge while the cakes are cooling. While everything is cooling and chilling, you
take a package of vanilla sandwich cookies and grind them up in the blender. (You’ll only want to do a few at a time or
you’ll make a huge mess.) At this point,
I was going to try to deviate a little from the recipe and use butter cookies
that wouldn’t have the crème in the center; I thought it would make less mess. I was wrong.
If you put butter cookies in a blender and hit it just once, poof, you
haven’t got crumbs, you’ve got dust. Anyway, take about a quarter to a half of
a cup of the cookie crumbs and put them in a jar with a few drops of green food
coloring and shake. These will serve to
look like the little chlorophyll granules in cat litter.
After the cakes have cooled, take a new cat litter box
(Did I really have to specify new? I
thought it only safe) and crumble the cakes up into it. Put about half the remaining cookie crumbs in
and most of the vanilla pudding and mix.
You don’t want the mixture soggy, just moist. Then you take all but a little of the
remaining cookie crumbs and spread on top.
Now here comes the fun part. You
get about a dozen or so tootsie rolls and microwave them for a few seconds to
make them soft. Then you “form” them (I
let my kiddo do that part, she thought it was a hoot).Take a few and “bury”
them, put the rest on top. Sprinkle the
rest of the cookie crumbs and then scatter the green crumbs around. Serve with a NEW pooper scooper. You can even put the pan down on some
newspaper, and scatter some cookie crumbs and a few extra tootsie rolls
around. I didn’t for this occasion,
since I carried it in to Tim, but serving it somewhere, I probably would have.Everyone thought it was hilarious...a good chuckle was had by all...and then everyone dug in. Not a crumb or a tootsie-roll turd remained 30 minutes later. Like I said, they'll eat anything around here (except, apparently, zombie-flesh banana bread.)
No comments:
Post a Comment