Koko's Gone Nuts Cake

She's such a dear little cat. . .right! At least she is until she has a random synapse fire, and she just goes crazy. That's what happened the other night when I tried to put together a "real" cocoanut cake.

For about a month I have been craving coconut cake, the real kind that mom used to make with the cooked 7 minute frosting and all. I've had the cake in restaurants recently, but it just hasn't been the same, so the other night I baked 2 layers and got them ready for the frosting. Mom and I went out to dinner and a movie, and when we got home I started on the frosting. It is quite a complicated process, difficulty level of 10, and it went really well for me that night.

It involves a double boiler, a hand mixer, and some really funky chemistry that involves eggs whites, salt, a lot of sugar, almond extract, orange extract and vanilla.

I had just finished putting in the apricot filling, completed frosting the top and was moving down to the sides when it all started. I needed to move my kitchen stool over to the other side of the counter so that I could frost the sides, and at the same time Koko was stealing a bit of cat food from Thelma's bowl that was under the butcher block table. When Koko saw the stool coming towards her, she freaked.

You know how when there is a tragedy everything goes in slow motion? Well this was nothing like that. It was more like a roadrunner cartoon, with the "woop woop woop" music and all! It went so fast. There was Koko, she ran straight up the side of the kitchen cabinet, landed in the cake and just stood there spinning her legs at 90 miles an hour. Cake, frosting, apricots were flying. Then she just flew across to the other side of the countertop, and the frosting bowl and a large ceramic bread bowl fell from the countertop to the floor. Nothing broke. . .except the cake that is. Not a drop of icing fell from the bowl. It was sort of a miracle. The ceramic bowl was intact but I was a total wreck.

Of course I screamed, 3 cats disappeared for the next 12 hours, and mom just yelled from upstairs, "what did you break now?"

Well, I was able to salvage some of the cake. I just cut off all of the parts that Koko had ruined, and ended up with about half of a cake left, so I frosted it, applied cocoanut and had a slice. I thought about putting the pile of wasted cake in the cat's food bowl for the next 3 days, but thought better of that. Don't want them hyped up any more than they already are on sugar.

It was so like living in a cartoon there for a split second. Much later that night Koko had the nerve to jump up on the bed and "meow" at me. She's got nerve for someone who weighs only 6 pounds. We both curled up and went to sleep.