Small But Weird

This week I've been eating cauliflower with American cheese melted over it. That always reminds me of food coloring.

When I was 13 I wanted to learn how to decorate cakes. The Wilton class at the party store was canceled so I taught myself. But my mom didn't believe in artificial food coloring, so I was limited to coloring frosting with cocoa, spinach juice, or beet juice. While I made some very pretty monochromatic cakes in shades of chocolate the Wilton yearbooks had amazing cakes in a rainbow of colors.

But then there was an incident that made my mom change her mind. One day I wanted to make a cake with pink frosting all over as the base for monochromatic roses and leaves. My mom remembered we'd had beets for dinner earlier that week and instructed me to use the collected juice from the bottom of the jar where the leftovers were stored. So I did.

But when we tasted the cake something was horribly, horribly wrong. What my mom hadn't remembered and I, at 13, didn't think was important, was that my dad had put the beets away in the same container as cauliflower with cheese. So by using the juice in that container for the frosting we had ended up with a cauliflower-, cheese-, and beet-flavored cake.

And after that I was allowed to use fully artificial, fully rainbow food coloring.