Once, when I was nine years old and it was the day before New Year’s Eve, I baked a cake. Not just any cake, a honey cake. It is my favorite type of cake and the cake I bake for every birthday. I had baked it for my birthday earlier that year.
As the cake was in the oven, it gave off a warm, comforting smell that was delicious. That smell soon became my favorite smell in the world. That night, we fed my bernedoodle, Dusty, and then went out to dinner. It was a delicious dinner at a restaurant called Bistro Seven.
I ordered an appetizer of lollipop pork chops garnished with cilantro and garlic butter. For my drink, I had seltzer water with cranberry juice. For the next course, I had a five-ounce wagyu hanger steak garnished with caramelized onion and aromatic steak sauce. For the last course, I had my favorite dessert, the Creme Brûlée.
After the delicious and filling meal, we returned home. Everything seemed normal. The door was locked, the dog was wagging, and nothing was out of place. We hung up our coats, and my grandpa and I sat down to watch football. Suddenly, I heard my mom shout, “The cake is gone!” She was right. The cake was gone. I turned around to look. All that remained on the wire cooling rack were a few sullen crumbs, sad residuals of the magnificent golden-brown cake.
“There are crumbs on Dusty’s bed!” my brother exclaimed.
In a second, everybody was shouting. “Where's the dog?” they yelled almost in unison. Everybody was running around the house. My mom checked in her and dad’s bedroom. That’s where she saw it, the giant heap of greenish-brown sludge.
After she yelled, “Dusty got sick on the bed,” everyone was there in an instant. We all stared, and then a shadow appeared at the door. It was Dusty wagging happily. Can you imagine the defiance? His sitting there wagging with cake crumbs on his whiskers was like somebody getting tons of Fs and failing school and saying, “OK.” I thought it was always the strangest thing that Dusty would always wag his tail after doing something wrong. It was like he was saying, “In your face, humans.”
After my mom scolded the dog until he looked like he understood, everything resumed as normal. The next afternoon, I baked another cake, and as always, the same delicious, sweet smell wafted through the halls. And that was that. New cake on New Year’s, dog still the same, but one thing did change: we never put cake on the counters again.
Written by a fifth-grade budding food critic.
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