There are two things about teenagers that will never change. 

Number one, they have fertile imaginations.  And number two, they are fearless.

Ask a teenager to help with laundry, and the excuses you’ll hear will give you a taste of the unbelievable imagination they have.  Tell them not to drive fast and they will give you the “I’m not afraid of anything” look.

But ask a teenager to bake a cake, and you’d better hold on tight for the wild ride. 

My daughter and her friend decided to bake a cake for the birthday of one of their friends.  Okay, simple enough.

Well, we didn’t have a boxed cake mix, so they decided to make it from scratch.  Red flags should have started flying, but silly me, I thought it was a pretty good idea. 

They thumbed through a couple of cookbooks and settled on making a Red Velvet Cake.  Ummmmmmm… I could already taste it.

I left them alone.  I began to worry myself sick about the condition of the kitchen and the status of the cake, so I peeked in to check on them.

They were pouring the most gosh-awful-looking gook into some muffin tins.

I didn’t want to sound hysterical, so in my calmest voice, I commented, “Uh, it sure doesn’t look like red velvet.”

“Well we couldn’t find any red food coloring, so we used blue and green instead,” was their reply.

Imagination.  No fear.  The stuff looked like moldy meatloaf and they weren’t even fazed.  I would have had a pit in my stomach.

“Oh.  Well, okay, then.  Only you can’t call it red velvet cake anymore.  Maybe green velvet muffins is closer,” I added. 

Something else didn’t look right.  “Um, did you grease those muffin tins before you poured the batter in?”  Mothers are always checking up on their kids.  We can’t help it.

“Grease?”  They looked puzzled.  The obvious answer was “No.”  But again, they were unfazed.  Even an experienced cook would have panicked about now.

“If they get stuck, we’ll just carve them out,” they insisted.  Which, of course, is what happened only they didn’t just pop right out like they had hoped.  They kind of crumbled out.

Still unfazed.  Time for more imagination.  They piled all the hunks onto a plate in the shape of a small hill and decorated the edge of the plate like it was the masterpiece they had intended all along.

An older woman would have been weeping, while rushing to the store to buy more ingredients to start all over again.

I won’t even go into the icing fiasco which turned out pretty good, considering they used twice as much butter as was called for.  Of course, they couldn’t ice the mountain, so we just sort of had a bowl of icing to dip the hunks into.

The kitchen was a disaster.  But we had a cake, by golly.  And icing, or sorts.

A green velvet mountain.  Sure to become a family tradition.