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"The moment I read the flyer from my son&amp;#039;s fourth grade teacher, I started to get a sharp pain over my right eye. It says I&amp;#039;m supposed to take part in the class project entitled, &amp;quot;How to Turn a Cake into a County.&amp;quot; But I have a hard enough time turning a cake into a cake \u2013 especially one somebody might actually want to eat. Creating a confectionary Mercer County, New Jersey, from a box of Duncan Hines is clearly out of my league.  Of course, I am thrilled for my son and his 20 classmates as they attempt to create a four-foot long cake shaped like New Jersey by piecing together smaller cakes that represent the 21 counties of our home state. I just wish we lived in Rhode Island, as they have only five counties. Then I wouldn&amp;#039;t have to bake this darn cake.  The directions on the flyer call for adding two cups of Teddy Graham snacks, any flavor, to the cake mix batter. I picture all those bears bobbing in my batter, and I just know they&amp;#039;ll cause my cake to bake unevenly or worse, morph into something that looks more like a diorama of Pompeii circa 79 AD, than a tasty treat for kids.  After cooling and freezing the cake, I&amp;#039;m supposed to place the flyer&amp;#039;s attached cutout of Mercer County, which isn&amp;#039;t even our county, and &amp;quot;very carefully&amp;quot; cut around it, &amp;quot;using a sawing motion with a sharp knife.&amp;quot; Next to this set of directions are the words &amp;quot;(parent job),&amp;quot; presumably because a parent is more qualified to turn a cake into a county than a fourth grader is.  But the author of these directions never saw the baseball bat with ball cookies I had created from scratch for my son&amp;#039;s birthday celebration back in second grade. Let&amp;#039;s just say they looked like they belonged in a pamphlet from a urologist&amp;#039;s office, and leave it at that.  So, I&amp;#039;m not so certain our cake will turn out to look anything like Mercer County. In fact, it&amp;#039;s entirely possible that it won&amp;#039;t fit into the other five county cakes that border it. (Why couldn&amp;#039;t we get Cape May? It&amp;#039;s largely surrounded by water. Certainly Cape May would make it easier for me to hide my cake baking ineptitude.)  The most disconcerting part of the entire project is the flyer&amp;#039;s promise that &amp;quot;How to Turn a Cake Into a County&amp;quot; will provide a &amp;quot;lifetime memory&amp;quot; for our children. Yes, like the baseball bat cookies. It&amp;#039;s unforgettable.  Lucky for me, the icing, assembling and decorating part of the giant New Jersey cake will all take place at school. The flyer says that the parents who, like me, volunteered to chaperone the class trip earlier this week are ineligible to assist in this historical edible geography lesson in the classroom.  So as I prepare our county cake and send it to school with my son, all I can say is, don&amp;#039;t eat Trenton. I warned you.   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a21808/school-baking-project/?src=shelter_footer>