My mixed up gene pool

I will never be my mother for a lot of reasons, like:

• I don't smoke

• I (mostly) stay on track when I tell a story and don't veer off into 70 different stories.

• For every 1 meal I cook that turns out to be amazing, I screw up 4 others that I try to bake. That's a terrible success rate, especially since I grew up with a parent and grandparent who cooked from scratch. I just don't have a sweet thumb. AT ALL.
  

For example, this weekend Dan and I went to visit my mom and brother in Baltimore to celebrate Mother's Day and Dan's birthday. While we were out there, I volunteered to bake Dan a cake for his birthday. I bought a Betty Crocker mix because Betty knows her stuff and never lets me down. Turns out, Betty and convection ovens don't mix well.

What's a convection oven? I'm not really sure, but my mom swears by hers and it's the same kind they use on Top Chef, so I figured if stressed out chefs can can cater to 150 people using convection ovens, SURELY I can make a BOXED Betty Crocker Red Velvet cake in one.

How wrong was I? 10 minutes into the 35 minute baking time, I started smelling smoke but brushed it off because the cake still had 25 minutes left on the timer to cook. 25!!

Seriously, I don't even want to talk about it. I'll just show you a picture of my failure, and then a picture of the strawberry rhubarb pie that my mom made in the same convection oven on the same day that turned out perfectly.















Which one would you rather eat? I tried both, and guess which one I had to spit out? (Not the pie.)

In summary, even though I'm ecstatic that I didn't get my mother's wiry Italian mop (translation: frizz head that can barely be brushed), some baking skills would have been nice.