Be careful what you wish for: you just might get it.

Last spring my sister put me in touch with her friend Kathleen, who had seen and tasted some of what I’d baked in the past and wanted to know if I would make a cake for her sister-in-law’s baby shower. My answer was of course yes, and even though the shower was two months away, Kathleen and I got down to brainstorming what the cake would look like. Heather – the mom-to-be – was having a little boy and was set on a shower color scheme of navy blue, light blue, and green, but was still deciding between elephants and bow ties as possible decorating themes.

Seeing that this could go one of two ways – elephants wearing bow ties or bow ties with elephants on them – I quickly recommended the latter as the more achievable option for a decorator whose sculpture experience up to that point had been entirely abstract and largely circular in nature (surprise!). Kath and I decided that the cake would have a border of fondant bow ties, each featuring one of four patterns – polka dots, gingham, stripes, and elephants – in various color combinations of light blue, navy blue, and green like Heather had requested.

With the concept decided, I took advantage of the extensive lead time (thanks Kath!) to plan out the cake more than I ever have for a baking project. I dusted off my geometry skills to figure out how many bow ties would fit around the diameter of a 12” round cake and painstakingly created a mockup that laid out each bow tie’s color palette, pattern, and position on the cake. A few weeks before the baby shower, after watching and re-watching fondant bow tie instructional videos online, I was ready to begin.

Each bow tie pattern presented its own unique frustrations combined with the overarching challenge of racing the clock before the fondant began to harden. The polka dot bow ties required dozens of small white fondant circles cut out with the business end of an icing tip, which I then applied painstakingly with tweezers that looked (and felt) disconcertingly like a mad dentist’s tool. The thin strips of fondant I cut out for the striped bow ties made my kitchen look like an erstwhile linguine factory, and trying to create edible “watercolors” that matched the blues and greens of the fondant for the gingham bow ties proved to be an exercise worthy of Pantone’s intervention.

But the elephant bow ties really – and please don’t hate me for this – took the cake. With no cookie cutters readily available that were small enough, I had to improvise and MacGyver (or MacGruber, for my fellow SNL fans and if we want to accurately set the scene) a solution out of household materials. I cut an elephant shape out of sheet of sturdy plastic, then placed the resulting stencil on top of the fondant. After layering another piece of the same plastic on top and rolling over my two-piece “cookie cutter” with a rolling pin, the elephant’s shape was raised enough from the fondant that I could finish cutting it out precisely with an x-acto knife. With each cutout taking approximately ten minutes to complete, making thirty for three bow ties was truly an elephantine task. (Again, I’m so sorry – I promise I get my comeuppance for these puns if you stick with me for just a few more paragraphs.)

A week before the shower, all the bow ties were completed: now all that remained was to bake the layers, make the frosting, and assemble the cake. Because the baby shower was on a Saturday morning, I had to bake the layers ahead of time and freeze them, then assemble the cake on Thursday night and add the decorations on Friday night. While this was the biggest cake I’d ever made, each layer turned out well and made it into the freezer successfully, and on Thursday morning I moved the layers into the fridge in preparation for trimming, cutting, and frosting.

Later that evening, as I was cutting the cake rounds into thinner layers for assembly, I found myself wondering what I would write about in a blog post for this cake. I usually love talking about all the things that go comically wrong when I bake – whether it’s accidentally lighting my sister’s birthday cake on fire or forgetting ingredients for the umpteenth time – but so far everything had gone smoothly and run ahead of schedule with this project. It seemed like it would be a beautiful cake, but a boring post devoid of interesting plot twists.

The next thing I knew, I was standing over the sink bleeding from a deep gash in my thumb before being hustled out the door by my cousin and aunt (who happened to be visiting) for a trip to Urgent Care.

I’d of course cut myself while attempting to slice through a still semi-frozen cake round with a brand-new serrated knife, and spent the next three hours sitting in a small exam room waiting to get stitches. My cousin Gwen – who just completed her first year of medical school and was at the time waiting on acceptances – sat with me the whole time, and I’m pleased to report that she already has outstanding bedside manner. She spent her evening consoling a patient whose priorities were wildly out of order: rather than worrying about my thumb as an issue in and of itself, my panic was focused solely on what this would mean for the cake – would the layers (that we’d only perfunctorily covered with saran wrap before dashing out the door) be completely dried out by the time we got home? If so, how on earth would I be able to make new ones before the cake was due? And even if the layers were usable, how would I assemble and finish decorating the cake with one (albeit my non-dominant) hand completely out of commission?

To add insult to injury (another pun, I know: but have some sympathy, I’m injured at this point in the story), I proved to have something of a resistance to Lidocaine: it took three rounds of painkiller shots – including two rounds of the doctor poking me with the same sharp needle to see if they’d worked – to get my hand numb enough for stitches, and then I had to get a tetanus shot on top of that. On the plus side, I now know that I have the world’s most inconvenient super power (can’t wait to see if that epidural works if I ever have children) and that I can be wildly incautious around rusty metal for the next five to ten years.

I also had the plot twist I’d been wishing for.

One splint, three hours, four stitches, and a fifty-dollar copay later, Gwen and I left Urgent Care around 11:00 and walked back to the apartment. She went to bed; I went straight back to the cake.

(Now before anyone calls food safety foul, let me assure you that when I say my blood, sweat and tears went into this cake, I mean it in a purely metaphorical sense: no blood got on the cake, I cleaned the offending knife with bleach, and even replaced our scrub brush to avoid any possible contamination.)

Fortunately the cake rounds seemed to have survived their time alone in the apartment, and I was able to slice the rest of them (without further incident, and with only one hand) and get the cake assembled with a crumb coat of frosting before collapsing into bed…

…Only to wake up 3 hours later as our smoke alarm decided this was the perfect night to announce that its batteries were low. Blearily wondering if I was on Candid Camera at this point, I gave up on trying to make the beeping stop and stuck the alarm under the couch cushions before going back to sleep.

I woke up feeling oddly refreshed the next morning, and, after leaving Gwen a note explaining why our couch was beeping, headed off to work. Taking pity on me following a morning of awkwardly typing with one hand at my computer, my manager let me leave the office early, which meant I was able to take my time frosting the cake and applying the bow ties that night.

On the morning of the shower I achieved what in hindsight seems like a miracle – I carried a 20-pound cake through the NYC subway with an incapacitated thumb and emerged victorious at the other end, the cake whole and unharmed. Kath received the cake with enthusiasm and inquired kindly about my thumb, which I breezily brushed off as “just a slight baking incident”. I took my leave before the party started, but I’m told the mom-to-be loved the cake as well, and that the baby shower was a success.

The cake may have disappeared in an afternoon, but the faint mark on my thumb from the knife has proved longer lasting. I don’t mind scars, though, as long as I can remember how I came by them: they’re physical reminders of both the prosaic and pivotal moments of my life.

…like the old scar on my right arm from running into a tree at summer camp, and the newer scar on my left arm from Election Night 2016.

But that last one’s a story for another time and place.