I love batter. As a child I would beg my mother to let me bake crazy cakes just so I could eat spoonful after spoonful of the batter before putting the cake into the oven. Sometimes even after it was in the oven I would sneak a few more spoonfuls before the batter got hot.
Crazy cake is made without eggs so the argument that raw eggs would make me sick was out. Mom had to revert to the old “Because I said not to eat it, that’s why!” spiel.
It didn’t matter if the batter was chocolate, yellow, spice or brownie, I ate them all.
My dad had a huge sweet tooth so he loved all the cake in the house. If it wasn’t frosted he didn’t care. He would just cut his piece in half and put butter in the middle and eat it that way. I didn’t really like the cake once it was baked. Batter was much more appealing.
I thought I was the only one with this fetish until I met a lady at work in the Cities. Because of a communication seminar we were taking, each person had to share his or her most embarrassing moment. Her story went like this: She was mixing up cake batter in a bowl using a handheld electric mixer. The cord came unplugged and landed right in the batter. No one was looking so she fished the cord out of the batter and stuck it in her mouth—completely forgetting that the other end was still plugged into the wall! She received the shock of her life and then had to explain to her husband why she stuck an electrical cord in her mouth just to retrieve a little bit of batter.
I laughed really loud as I could actually see myself committing the same battercide one day. I asked her if this shock therapy had cured her of her batter cravings; she said no. I guess it takes more that a few volts to cure this “disease.”
I am afraid I have passed this gene onto my daughter and her friends, although for them it’s raw cookie dough. They will make up a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough at two a.m., and then eat most of the batch while watching scary movies. I’ve decided not to fight it as my mother did when I was young. Half the fun of being a kid is eating things that are bad for you.
All those times she told me I would get a stomachache or sick just never happened. Maybe it’s just a mother’s myth like sitting too close to the TV will ruin your eyes or cracking you knuckles will give you arthritis. Bad eyes and sore hands seem to just come with age…or do they? You only live once. I’m willing to risk it…Batter up!
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
Taste of Home columnist Sandy (Anderson) Holthaus lives on a farm in South Haven, MN with her husband, Michael, and their children Zoe, Jack and Ben. Her heart remains on the North Shore where she grew up with her parents, Art and LaVonne Anderson of Schroeder. She enjoys writing about her childhood and mixes memories with delicious helpings of home-style recipes.
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