Baking Fairies

When I was a freshman in high school, I had a group of friends who mostly liked to do stage crew and take apart computers. But sometimes, when we didn't have a show and computers got boring, they'd bake. And they called themselves the Baking Fairies.

Just so we are all agreed on the image, "fairy" is not the first thing one would think of upon meeting any of this group. Not the second, or the fifth, or the last. So I really don't know where the name came from. But they earned it, in my eyes, with their Bomb Cake.

My freshman year, we had a few bomb threats at our school. Not many, and nowhere near the numbers to which we would climb by my senior year, but a few. This was also pre-9/11 so the bomb threat procedure involved sending out a note to the parents explaining that a threat had been made, but police were fairly certain that there was nothing to worry about. Parents had the choice of keeping their kids home.

This was back in the days when we had snow, as well. And there was one February morning when we all trudged to school looking like lawn gnomes with our snow gear. It was snowing hard by the time I got to school. And I had gotten up at something like 6 am to wait for a bus in the snow and the cold, and it was never on time, and I was probably a little bit grumpy. I think this was before I drank coffee.

When I got to school, I had some time before homeroom, and I found some of the Baking Fairy contingent huddled around some sort of package in the lobby (not all of the Fairy folk were still in school). They were looking triumphant, and when I elbowed my way into the crowd, I was confronted with a chocolate sheet cake. It had bright green icing, and, carefully spelled out in multicolored sprinkles, the word "BOMB" on the top.

Right about then, the assistant principal noticed our small gathering and decided to investigate, so we invited him to cut the cake. Pieces were passed around, we had cake before homeroom, and then there was enough snow that we all got to go home early.