Dot matrix.

Because I am increasingly morphing into Betty Sue "Homemaker" Crocker, I baked a cake tonight. Okay, I haven't learned how to scratch one out of a rubber band and a toothpick yet (wait, that's Betty Sue MacGyver) like my sister who baked the above work of confectionery art, but the 84-cent cake mix from WalMart -- now that I can rock. It's a chocolate-iced marble cake because, frankly, I need the chocolate. And as I was slathering on the icing -- feeling rather like Augustus Gloop -- I had a flashback.

The spatula strokes (think brush strokes) left in the chocolately goodness reminded me of the birthday cake your mom made you for your first birthday. Instead of spending the money to order a nice one from the bakery (because you were inevitably going to annihilate the cake with your grimy little one-year-old hands with icing oozing between your grimy little one-year-old fingers), she just made one like the one I've got sitting on my counter. And she bought those little gritty dot-matrix-looking candy letters (I only remember them in some combination of blue, yellow, and white) and pushed them into the icing to spell out Happy Birthday! in the miraculous event that the letters didn't break during the perilous journey from the grocery.

That is the kind of cake you see in the foreground of yellowed Polaroids.

Did anybody ever really eat those letters?

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