According to some, the world ends (or at least experiences a major disaster) today. Blue Cat doesn’t think that’s going to happen, but he did experience a minor disaster and saw how improvising and being creative can help you when things don’t go the way you’ve planned.
Blue Cat’s creator is going to a party today and promised to bake a cake. She used a new recipe, but didn’t remember to adjust the recipe for high altitude baking. (Blue Cat lives in Colorado Springs at an altitude of over 6000 feet above sea level.) You may not know it, but you need to add more flour and liquid to recipes when you’re baking at altitudes higher than 3500 feet, or else your cake may not rise the way you’d like it to.
The cake ended up severely depressed (which, for a cake – a usually festive piece of food – is catastrophic). Instead of a fluffy center, there was a giant dip. And layering the cake didn’t help…
Blue Cat’s creator didn’t panic – instead, she used the result to make an even cooler cake than she had planned. The depression became a crater, and she used materials from around the kitchen (including some cookie crumbs from another baking mishap) to create a semi-realistic meteor impact site (complete with high-temperature glass shards and a barely-surviving house). She took what could have been a baking nightmare and turned it into the perfect cake for a party on the last day of the Mayan calendar.
So the next time your plan doesn’t go as you had hoped, Blue Cat suggests you don’t give up. He says to use the situation to your advantage and see how it presents an opportunity to be successful in a different way.
Blue Cat also hopes there are some leftovers…
© William P Doyle, Jr 2012 All Rights Reserved
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