Cake Masters

When Chris left camp on Saturday, I was not sure who would be worthy to fill the empty void of the bed next to mine, but when Josh came back to Seneca on Sunday, I knew he would be a worthy camper.

 Seneca is running out of bed rails so I had to push Josh’s bed right next to Abdul’s so they can share the rail in the middle. Hopefully the two are good friends because they will be seeing a lot of each other even when they roll over at night.

Our cabin is quite similar to last week’s; Grandpa Greg switched cabins while Chris and Matt went home and we got three new campers. This includes Josh, who was in our cabin a few weeks ago and is still one of my favorites. We also have Jason, who was in my cabin for holiday camp. Jason is very high functioning and he loves everything about camp. Finally, we have Jeff, who I have never met before. So far, he seems easy to care for with the exception of his trouble swallowing; Jeff is the first camper I have had who needs his food pureed.

Monday started with some bangs. The first bang was Abdul running into the bathroom door, causing it to fall off the hinges. It also caused Josh to laugh for about five minutes even though he only heard it and did not actually see it happen. The other bangs were from thunder; it poured as we ran everyone up but the running did not help, we were soaked.

Thankfully, we had music in the morning so that activity was still on despite the rain. We thought boating would be canceled but when we woke up from a very successful nap the sun was shining and it was back on.

In the evening, we had a Rick Ruther concert. He has a Jimmy Buffet style and he played mostly older songs. The concert had a Cinco de Mayo theme to go along with the week’s theme, holiday week. Campers got virgin margaritas and other flavored drinks. I think I heard at least five campers who were disappointed in the lack of alcohol. Most of the campers wore leis as well, which I think is more Hawaiian than Mexican but I was not going to question it.  

Cody opened Tuesday morning with an announcement “Everyone, today we have a birthday…it is my birthday today so we will be singing ‘Happy Birthday.’” Cody has been planning his birthday for the last three weeks so this came as no surprise. Cody assigned me the task of making and designing a two-layer cake and he had other people on other duties.

By some miracle, the evening activity Tuesday was a cake decorating contest, so I told Cody that this was the cake I was making for him. In order to keep up the incredible amount of spirit our cabin has for our mascot, we chose to make our cake into a sheepdog head. First, we used white frosting then we had campers put black sprinkles around the edges to add a shaggy feeling to the dog. Next, we had campers put on a Fruit loop collar and dye marshmallows blue for the eyes.

One of the rules for the contest was that every cabin member had to be represented. We were wondering how to do this for awhile but then it came to us. Cody was adamant about adding dog poop to this cake, so we decided on eight chocolate piles of dog poop for the eight campers this week. This may seem like it was going too far to an outsider, but at this camp hardly an hour goes by without someone talking about poop so we were really just filling a quota.

Between our creativity with the poop, our cheerful presenting skills, and our high amount of camper involvement, we took first place in the contest. We were especially happy with this because there was some fierce competition out there between a well-done bumblebee cake and a castle complete with a moat.