05/28/2026
Chocolate Cake with Peanut Butter icing brings back such fond childhood memories🥰
Let me tell you about a time this cake temporarily for about 2 hours RUINED MY LIFE.
This is of course a classic but this was my mom’s staple dessert to bring on our camping trips.
I grew up in a wonderful, tight knit family. So these camping trips included all of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and all of my cousins. There are 11 of us “kids” (the cousins).
We roll into camp late on Friday, adults set up, us kids knew the drill, stay out of the way and go be feral somewhere else , “yunz got a whole damn woods, go play”🫡 got it, we did exactly that.
Twigs in our hair, scraped knees filthy, we came back to a beautiful lit campfire, all of us kids are thinking ok it’s on, cake time.
But instead 🙄we got “oh gosh, kids it’s so late better get to bed”.. begrudgingly we did just that.
The next morning we woke to a “GASP!”
All of us, the whole family, gathered around my mother and my aunt at the picnic table where the noise had come from.
And what carnage we did see… 😔
Our beautiful chocolate cake with peanut butter icing had been absolutely RAVAGED by raccoons. 🦝
They showed no mercy, they ripped off the lid, tossed it to the ground, and ate our cake with their glutinous, filthy little hands. Leaving nothing but a jagged edge of cake around the perimeter of the pan and peanut butter paw prints on our picnic table cloth.
Eleven absolutely devastated faces looked down at what could be described as no less than a massacre, and then at each other. Anger welled up in my tiny body and hot tears started to come; and then the adults started… laughing.
Who could laugh at a time like this!? This was serious business here people 🤨 a crime has been committed..
As my mother and aunts cleaned up the mess, joking that “that cake is so good, they wanted some too..”, “..must have been a party..” and all that nonsense, I knew right then that this incident would be a guiding example in my life, my disdain for raccoons, love for chocolate cake, and the lesson that you never leave one outside.