The plans were made. The high dollar ingredients purchased and set upon the kitchen counter at room temperature, like a real cook would do. The oven preheated to 375 degrees, just as the instructions read. Within the hour, a fatal mistake would bring doom.

Doom, with a capital D.

Before this point, I had made a desperate search through all of my family recipes to find Auntie Neal’s famous, butter-plus-butter-plus-butter pound cake and had even borrowed my mother’s special Bundt baking pan, just like a real cook.

You see our small church had the honor of preparing a special dinner for all of the ministers and wives in the county. Discussions at our church regarding the proposed meal were lengthy and detailed. Miss Mary volunteered to bring her always-delightful chocolate cake. Then there was to be Jenny’s chicken pie and Dorothy’s hand-creamed potatoes.

Hubs and I thought and thought. What culinary art could we create to make our mark in the prestigious lineage of the church eatery roster?

Of course, Auntie Neal’s butter-plus-butter-plus-butter pound cake! Yes, our name would go down in church baking history. Yep, and that is actually what happened, but not in the way we had planned.

Throughout the hours on that fateful day, Hubs and I worked our day jobs as we planned the baking frenzy proposed for the night. I called him. He called me. It all must be perfect.

I stopped by the grocery on my way home from work. I shopped, item by item, as I stalked the aisles for the perfect ingredients, all must be faultless, with the preciseness of the unmarred, the unscathed and dear Lord, never, ever a burnt bottom.

We cracked each of the ten eggs individually, making certain to beat intensely as we creamed the butter with the sugar making it soft and fluffy. We added the potent vanilla flavoring, that high-strung stuff we had bought in Mexico. Whew! It will knock your socks off. We slowly added the cake flour that was soft as a baby’s butt. Little by little the pound cake came together and it was mighty pretty. We looked at each other knowing our names would be added to the cake-bakers book of life. We were there!

Then Hubs (Yes, I blame it all on him.), said those prophetic words, “Let’s mix it in the blender, you know, just to make sure it’s all smooth and lush.”It seemed like a good idea at the time and so I went along with it.

Urrrrr, the blender did its thing and the beauty of the batter was overwhelming. As we poured the stuff into the Bundt pan, the clock struck midnight. We pulled up kitchen chairs for a front row view into the tiny window of the oven. It was as though we were giving birth to a new creation as we marveled at the rising batter – rising, rising, rising, and then some more, and then more – good gosh almighty, even more.

Finally the timer went off and we gingerly pulled from the oven the most beautiful, fully rounded specimen of a gorgeous pound cake ever created. With great care, we set the cake on the rack for cooling and that’s when the unthinkable happened.

As we stood there, we could actually hear the wind squishing out of the beautiful cake until it fell flat and had the consistency of rubber. The clock chimed one o’clock in the a.m. and all was not well.

We were on deadline. What to do?

In desperation I scratched around in the pantry and pulled out some canned pears. I threw mayo and cheese on them, and PUFF, it was all over. We immediately resumed our lives as ordinary cooks, nothing special.

The moral of trouble in cake-land: You can fool some of the people, some of the time, but you can’t fool The Lord. He knew that only my Auntie Neal could bake a cake of such magnificence.

But I must say, the pear/cheese/mayo dish seemed to be accepted and with a great flair, at least it was all eaten and I also noticed there was an ample amount of that other fancy chocolate cake left on the plate.

Yes, only The Lord knows.

Anne McKee is a Mississippi historian, writer and storyteller. She is listed on the Mississippi Humanities Speakers Bureau and Mississippi Arts Commission’s Performing Artist and Teaching Artist Rosters. See her website: www.annemckeestoryteller.com.