March is National Humorists Are Artists Month (HAMM)

Some of you might not realize that March has been designated as Humorists Are Artists Month. (HAAM for short.) I don't think of myself as an artist, but I am a cake decorator at my other job which does involve some artistry, but more importantly provides me with some humorous moments that I can steal to use at this job. One of my favorite funny cake decorator moments happened while taking a cake order over the telephone. The conversation went something like this:

Customer: Do you have a Tinkerbell cake?

Me: No, I'm sorry, that one's been discontinued.

Customer: Do you have Winnie the Pooh?

Me: Yes, we do.

Customer: Hmm, I need a cake with a Disney theme. What other Disney cakes do you have?

Me, rifling through my book: Well, we have Finding Nemo and the Little Mermaid, and The Lion King, and...

Customer, interrupting: Hmm, you know what, I'll go Pooh.

Hey, you're the customer!

Shortly after our store opened in our rural town I was making conversation with an elderly woman who had come to the bakery department and I happened to mention to her that our snack shop was soon going to be converted to a Subway.

"Oh, I'd rather drive!" she replied decidedly.

Another elderly woman came into the bakery looking for "little square apple pies." I assumed she was referring to the oblong, handheld pies that we sold, but I was told by another employee that we no longer carried them.

"Well, yes you do, I've got two cherry ones right here!" she exclaimed, holding up two small square boxes containing round pies.

"But those pies are round," I said, a little confused.

"Yes, but the box is square!" she quipped.

In order to indicate the size of our cakes in our cake case, we label them 1/8 sheet, 1/4 sheet, � sheet and so on. Some of our 1/4 sheet cakes are filled with a fruit filling in which case the label will indicate "1/4 filled cake". One day a woman walked up to my co-worker and picked up a 1/4 sheet filled cake and asked, "Which quarter of this cake is filled?"

Although cake decorating isn't exactly brain surgery it can often resemble cosmetic surgery. One day a woman brought in a full sheet cake that she had purchased from another bakery. Her cat had jumped on the cake after she got it home and squashed the lid down just enough to smoosh the image on the cake. It was an image of a man sitting in a rocking chair. The cat stepped squarely on the fine black piping of the man's ear. My co-worker began painstakingly putting the piping back in it's original place and as she did she shook her head and exclaimed, "This is the first time I've ever had to reattach an ear!"

When working with an unstable medium like icing, the potential for disaster is always present. Air bubbles frequently form in the pastry bag and come bursting out, making embarrassing noises, or worse, embarrassing images. Such as the time a co-worker's icing bag continued to squirt out icing as she lifted the bag away from a teddy bear cupcake cake she was making.

O.K., this one's a guy," she observed matter-of-factly.

An artist just wouldn't laugh at something like that.

And then there's he rest of us.