I feel like a medic when I transport my Scrabble board to someone’s home. My board folds into its own carrying case and features angled built-in casters that allow it to rotate as if on a pivot. It has a non-slip grid, which is essential for those who tend to bump into tables. The only thing it’s missing is a purple Crown Royal bag.
But I’m no medic: I want to hurt my opponents. In the calmest way possible.
Here’s where all 100 tiles ended up on Thursday night:
That’s right:
Wait…
Gonzo? No, that’s not right. Matt and I looked at each other, both of us ready to challenge Jenna, who was in the lead. Assuming Gonzo is nothing more than a Muppet character, Jenna would have lost her turn, giving Matt and me a chance to catch up. But if gonzo, with a lowercase g, is a word, the challenger would lose their turn.
“Okay, which of us is the challenger?”
Matt volunteered.
Here’s a list of Muppets that also serve as a playable word:
- Beaker
- Animal
- Scooter
- Miss
- Piggy
- Gonzo
Yeah, gonzo made it onto the list. One of the word’s definitions is “very strange or bizarre”. I hadn’t realized until now that Gonzo’s name was aptronymic; I didn’t even get to redeem myself in the game with a cool word like “aptronymic”.
Gonzo had gotten us good: the Z was nested in the Triple Letter Score space. That tile alone earned Jenna 30 points. I couldn’t be mad: she’d played the role of Swedish Chef before I showed up, preparing a kale salad with pickled onions and a tahini dressing, and vegetarian chili fries for dinner. Bork bork bork! All was hurdy gurdy!
I made them a special cake to ruin:
To the uncultured eye, the cake appears to be Scrabble-themed. To those who know better, it’s the cake that appears for five seconds in a Simpsons episode that first aired 32 years ago.
The roomie got it right away. However, after sampling the cake scraps I’d saved, he mistook it for carrot cake. Right colour, wrong vegetable: it was pumpkin cake.
I’d seen several versions of this cake made by other Simpsons fans, and always thought I could do better. Most of these reproductions used ready-made edible letters. I already had alphabet cookie cutters which, up until Wednesday night, I’d never used for cookies. My original plan was to cut the letters from rolled out marzipan, but because marzipan peaks in popularity in North America this time of the year, all four stores I checked had been cleaned out. Plan B was to make A-Z out of shortbread.
The shortbread recipe itself is as simple as can be: just beat butter with sugar until it’s soft, then mix in flour. Transforming the dough into coloured letters, however, felt like an endless process. Wearing nitrile gloves, I kneaded food colouring gel into six small batches of dough. Once the brightly colored balls of dough were prepared, I wrapped them in plastic and placed them in the fridge to chill for an hour or so. During that time, I baked The Best Pumpkin Cake I’ve Ever Had. I left the oven on at 350° while I cut out the letters, one by one. Despite tapping the cookie cutters into a dish of flour and wiggling the cutter as I pressed it into the dough — a baking hack I’d learned from my mom as a child — the letters wouldn’t leave their aluminum enclosures. Poking them out with the tip of a dinner knife left unsightly gashes in the dough. I rummaged through my assortment of crafting tools and found a wax carving tool with a bent tip to use as a dough-releasing prod.
It was 10:30pm when I’d wiped up the last crumbs left behind on the counter from my massive project of making tiny cookies, and they hadn’t even been added to the cake.
The cake tops were levelled with a bread knife to give it its sharp, cylindrical shape post-frosting. Chilling the first layer of icing before adding the second eliminated almost all traces of crumb. Not wanting to ruin The Special Cake for You to Ruin, I held off on adding the letters until 30 minutes before Matt came by to give me a lift to his and Jenna’s place. The cake was so moist, it was almost wet: I feared the cookies would get soggy and that the food colouring would bleed into the pristine icing job.
I want to say I nailed it to a T. Alas, upon closer inspection, I should have staked the shortbread T into the top. Overall, I would grade this cake a B.
The chili fries were a solid B — they could have been spicier. Nothing a few squirts of Valentina couldn’t fix. The salad, however, was the ace of the meal. As it turns out, you can win friends with salad.
And gonzo is a word that could fast-track you to victory, as it did for Jenna.
I would be happy for an excuse for more cake practice, so I hope this entices my friends to invite me over for dinner. I could also use the socializing practice!
(I have more updates for Pubes in Literature, but I’d rather keep pubes out of a post centered around cake.)
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