Mail Myself to You

In my international cake pan hunting adventures, I hit a bit of a wall with a particularly lovely cake pan.  No one would ship it to Canada for less than 50 Euros!  No one except my sweet friend Meridith.  She had it sent to her in Wisconsin and then mailed it north to me.  When I asked her how I could thank her, she said, BAKE ME A CAKE.  I think she might have been joking, but it seemed like a good challenge. Our postal workers were locked out, so I couldn't send anything anywhere, but last weekend, I knew I would be visiting the US and it would be the prefect chance to surprise Meridith with her very own cake.

First I consulted some instructions:

But a lavendar cake sounded gross. And two-steps sounded like it took too much planning.  And I was HIGHLY skeptical about whether freezing the cake would do me any favours, especially in the summer humidity - I suspected as the cake defrosted the condensation would just make for a totally mushy gross cake.  I decided to take my chances and bake her the same Paula Dean brown sugar pound cake from my first blog entry, in the Nordic Ware Heritage Bundt pan from Williams Sonoma.  I dragged this cake pan home from Toronto in February when my spinal disc problem was so bad I could barely walk.  And it was TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Once the cake was cooled, I double wrapped it in saran wrap, and put it in a box, surrounded by bubble wrap:

Friday we raced across the border, and made it to the USPS store at 4:15.  It closes at 4:30.  If I had my own baking reality show there would have been a lot of shots of me anxiously observing the traffic delays due to construction right before the border.   For an obscenely low amount of money the post office stamped "perishable" all over the box and sent it on its way to Meridith's place, where it arrived by Monday evening, complete in tact.  SUCCESS!