My son woke up uncharacteristically late yesterday morning, which made him cranky. He doesn’t like to miss the morning any more than I do.
“What would you like for breakfast?” I asked.
I love everything about eating breakfast and everything about making breakfast. If I had my way, all three meals in the day would be breakfast. It doesn’t seem fair or right that such an excellent meal comes only once a day.
“Butt cake,” he said.
“Butt cake! I don’t think we have any of that.”
I assumed he was trying to joke himself out of his cranky, so I tried to muster a laugh. Butt, poop, and fart jokes are perennial favorites around here. (I once asked my college students when poop jokes stop being funny to boys. The guys looked around the room, checking in with each other, and then broke the bad news to me: “Never!”)
“No, for real,” I said. “What would you like for breakfast?”
“Butt cake!” he insisted.
I waggled my eyebrows at him.
“Butt cake! BUTT CAKE!” Now he was really sounding cranky. “You’ve made it before! BUTT CAKE!”
I was just about to insist that I have most assuredly never served him butt cake when I realized what he was saying. Bundt cake. All those years I was saying Bundt cake, he was hearing butt cake.
This time, I really could laugh.
Once we cleared things up (Bundt is the name of the cake’s shape, not its flavor; no, I have no idea why; I’ll look it up), I had to break my own bad news: 11 a.m. is way too late to start making a Bundt cake for breakfast.
He made do with a bagel but grumbled about cake for the rest of the day.
I promised cake for breakfast tomorrow and asked what kind.
“Bundt!” he said.
“Ok, so did you hear me earlier when I explained that Bundt is a shape and not a flavor?”
“Bundt!”
“Yeah, but what flavor?”
“Soft!”
I didn’t point out that “soft” isn’t a flavor either. I kind of love it that Bundt cake brings out my son’s linguistic inner caveman. That’s how I feel about cake too.
This morning, I woke up early and made my own favorite Bundt cake, Joy the Baker‘s Sour Cream Coffee Cake. Though it’s in the breakfast section of her excellent cookbook, Homemade Decadence, it’s hardly the kind of balanced healthy breakfast I try to serve my son. But it is delicious.
(This is not a photo of Sour Cream Coffee Cake. But this Bundt cake looks pretty good too.)
the dirigible plum 
Leave a Reply