10 WAYS NOT TO BAKE PINEAPPLE UPSIDE DOWN CAKE

4 FEBRUARY, THURSDAY, HOME EC

It turned out that pineapple upside down cake is just putting canned pineapple and cherries at the bottom of your baking tin and then pouring the batter in. After that, pop it into the oven for 20 minutes. Let the cake cool and then turn the baking tin upside down to pop it out onto a plate. Tada!

All of us were given 2 slices of pineapple, and two cherries. Because it was an "easy" recipe, Mrs Martinez passed out the print out instructions and told us to do it individually. Okay, no problem. I've seen Savy bake lots of times and it's mostly just stirring stuff in a large bowl.

Savy told me that baking wasn't hard. "You just have to follow the instructions."

I can follow instructions. I can do this.

But the instructions must not have realised who it was talking to, because it had assumed that our class already knew certain things NOT to do when baking pineapple upside down cake. I've compiled 10 things not to do based on today's group experience.

1 EGGSHELLS ARE NEVER PART OF THE RECIPE

When the recipe calls for one egg, it means you should crack open the egg, drop its contents into the mixing bowl and throw the shell away.

Krystal said that she had known that the shell wasn't part of the recipe of course. Everyone knew that! Just that a bit of shell got dropped in accidentally.

A bit of shell... But you could see the little pieces embedded all over the finished cake. No one felt like pointing it out to her though.

And more than one girl accidentally had a bit of shell in her cake. Liam had received a few cakes after school. A couple of them had shell.

"You should spit that out." Marcus told him when Liam's chewing suddenly produced a crunching sound.

Liam shook his head and swallowed, "It's okay. I'm used to it."

2 IT'S ALL IN THE MIX

You'd think that baking is pouring everything into a large bowl and stirring, but it's not. The first half is the wet ingredients like eggs and milk and butter. You need to beat that together. And then when you get to the flour, you need to "fold" it into your mixture. If you keep beating the batter, your cake won't rise - even if you didn't forget to put in the baking soda. So when mixing, there is whipping/whisking/beating/folding. It's like throwing a punch. You can punch, but you can also jab, cross, hook, or upper cut too. Well, that's the closest analogy I could think of anyway.

So flattest pineapple upside down cake went to Arlene who forgot to put in the baking soda.

Second flattest went to Jasmine who worked really hard at mixing everything up. She thought the more she whipped the thing, the fluffier it would get, but it turned out the opposite.

3 POURING OUT THE BATTER

So now that you've got the batter, you need to grease your baking tin, and then arrange the pineapple and cherries at the bottom. After that, pour in your batter. The thing is, you need to pour it in carefully, if you did it in a hurry, you might end up with Elena's cake.... When she flipped it over, all the pineapple and cherry pieces where smushed to the sides of the cake. I heard she actually made the fruit pieces to form a name or something, but you couldn't tell whose name from the finished cake.

I guess she had cut her fruit into smaller pieces too, so they were quite light and the batter dumped into the tin just wiped out everything... I wouldn't say like a tsunami, more like a mudslide because cake batter is like wet cement.

4 DON'T DROP THE CAKE

I guess this would seem obvious, but it did happen... When Zara took her cake out of the oven, it was really hot and she dropped it.

"Oh my god!" Mrs Martinez had to screech, "Samantha!"

It wasn't even my cake...

Zara tried to pick it up, but only the baking tin came off.

"Now it's really an upside down cake!" Mrs Martinez declared at the broken cake on the floor, "Clean up the mess, girl!"

Could it be that Mrs Martinez could not remember Zara's name? But it was right there embroidered on the front of her apron. Except when she was crouched in front of the cake, I guess you couldn't see it.

Zara seemed to be used to Mrs Martinez enough by now to ignore the extra noise being produced from the sidelines. She saved her cake by cutting off the bottom part that touched the floor.

"At least it's delicious." She told me.

5 TALKING ABOUT BROKEN CAKES

If your cake hasn't cooled yet or isn't completely done cooking, and you tried to flip it out of the tin because, say an irate home ec teacher was calling all kinds of threats at you for being slow, then your cake would very likely be broken when you force it out.

It can't be fixed. Even if you cried.

6 DON'T BURN THE CAKE

If you left your cake too long in the oven, or if you accidentally turned the tamperature knob too high, it would burn. Even if the top looked fine, after you flip your cake over, you'd find the cake burned on the fruit side.

"The bottom is still edible." Janice told Leia in a bid to comfort the other girl.

7 WHIP CREAM IS INSTANT CAKE GLUE

"If you combined my cake and yours, it would be the full cake." Zara told Leia.

So they sliced off the top of Leia's cake, and put Zara's cake on top of it. The cake stuck together with a generous dollop of whipped cream that Janice made from scratch.

8 GETTING HELP FROM THE MASTER

Janice was an angel... An angel who knew how to bake, and how to heal broken cakes.

After finishing her cake, she helped her partner clean up. Then she made whipped cream for Zara and Leia. She was also the one who helped me put my cake in the oven with her's (and take it out too) because it was "perfect timing". Zara and I had forgotten to preheat our oven and she was just putting in her cake anyway.

I don't think my cake would've come out the way it did without her help at that crucial moment.

9 MY PERSONAL DOWNFALL

So by various turns of luck, my cake came out alright. Mrs Martinez looked disgruntled at my modest little cake. I was rather proud of it.

My friends came over to admire it. They looked at the two pineapple rings next to each other, and then the two cherries inside each ring.

"Boobs." Krystal announced, "Its a boob cake."

Eh? I looked at my cake, "Eh?"

"Hahaha." Zara said, "Maybe if you eat it, you would finally get some boobs."

Leia cast me a sidelong look, "You'd need them."

Eh? I looked down at my chest. Eh?!?

The cool girls laughed.

I guess how your arrange your fruit mattered.

10 MANAGE YOUR EXPECTATIONS

Our cake was made of exactly two pineapple rings, two cherries, plain cake batter, and a small rectangular baking tin.

Even after being dubbed "boob cake" my cake looked extremely unspectacular.

This was normal, since it was just a basic cake made by a basic noob. In fact, I considered it a real success.

There was no way to make an insta-worthy cake out of this... Unless you were Janice. Janice had cut her pineapple rings into two heart shapes filled with red chopped cherries.

She took photos to upload on her channel. I found out she had her own channel where she uploaded the things she had baked and decided to follow her. For some reason, this made Janice really happy, which made me happy too.

Then the cool girls made me follow all their channels too.

"You should have your own channel." Krystal told me, "All the popular girls have one."

I shrugged, it wasn't like I was in that category. Plus what would I post? Pictures of opponents I KOed? Hahaha. Those just arent the same as cute cakes, hamsters, fashion, gossip, or wefies with your besties.

Since our cakes were packed neatly in our food boxes and our work counters were cleaned, Mrs Martinez dismissed us early.

This was how I got to the foyer before the guys. The cool girls followed me out, commenting on the channels in their feed. Jasmine had started her own channel too. She seemed a little nervous and excited about it at the same time.

Her last post was a re-post of what a senior in her cheerleading team posted. It was of Jasmine and the other new recruits successfully forming a pyramid.

The post before that was a re-post of Liam smiling somewhere in school. Liam had a lot of photos going on in different channels for different reasons and Jasmine would re-post every single one of them.

I scrolled down a bit before I found anything that wasn't a repost... It was a photo of Jasmine and some teens I didn't know at the amusement park. Jasmine posted it with the caption, "So nice to do something childish with my childhood friends!"

It was a nice picture. Jasmine looked really happy in it. And it made me realize once again that all my friends had lives outside of school too.

"I never really could think of anything interesting to post." Jasmine bemoaned.

"Just repost." Leia advised, "I'm the repost queen."

If by repost queen, Leia meant reposting others' photos and adding a catty comment, she really was the queen.

"It's hard being an original content creator." Krystal said with a toss of her head. Krystal had a channel showcasing her daily fashion updates.

"Why? I think it's easy." Zara said, "My babies give me new things to post about everyday!"

"Nobody wants to see your hamster posts!" Krystal argued.

Actually, I thought they were cute.

"Why? At least they are really original." Zara said pointedly.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Krystal asked lowly.

"It means I don't try to copy shots angle for angle from other people's channel!" Zara shot back.

Krystal took offense, "At least my shots have variety and style and a huge following."

Krystal did have a pretty big following... Like more than a thousand.

Zara had 8.

Come to think of it, did that mean that Krystal knew more than a thousand people? I started to feel a bit impressed.

"You should start a channel too, Sam." Jasmine told me, "It'll be nice to keep in touch with what you're doing."

What I'm doing? Even I don't know what I'm doing half the time!

"Does your Prince Charming have a channel?" Krystal asked.

Who? Right Harvey... Hmmm... I had no idea. I wondered if any of my pack friends had their own channels... Jessica! I should add her!

Krystal checked my phone, "It's just us... And this fancy girls school."

Oh right, the little bird from the Lorent Girls' Academy.

"Are your friends there?" Jasmine asked.

I looked at my screen. Oprah's picture was on it. I nodded, "Kind of."

Actually, I should add New Leaf Academy too right?

I'm going to be so connected!

That is, if I actually looked at my phone. But at least I had it on my person today, and it was decently charged.

I'm not sure why the other girls were here. Even Abigail and Pearl and the other girls were at the table across from us.

Abigail sounded terribly troubled about something, "I think Henry is angry at me for choosing Terrence as my Romeo over him, so I was hoping to give him my cake as an apology, but now it's ruined!"

The other girls cooed their understanding.

"Oh! How about you exchange your cake with Janice?" One of the random girls suggested, "I'm sure she wouldn't mind."

"Ah, well, actually..." Janice started.

"What a good idea!" Another random girl beamed loudly, "Janice, you're such a lifesaver!"

"Ah, yeah...but..." Janice continued.

"Would you really be willing to help me, Janice?" Abigail asked, "You're such a good friend."

"Yeah, ah, okay I guess." Janice reluctantly passed her yellow food box over to Abigail.

"Thank you so much!" Abigail smiled, "I really owe you!"

"It's okay..." Janice said.

I was supposed to meet Henry and Marcus here. I looked out at the driveway, my ride wasn't here yet, neither was Henry's... I knew because none of the cars were red. I checked my wolf radar... Mate!

Mate! Mate! Mate was nearby! Oh and Killion too, but Mate!

I grinned. I was that happy.

"What's up with her?" Zara asked.

"Must be a boy." Krystal decided.

I tried to stop the smile on my face. The girls tried to peek at my phone, but I pocketed it.

"Definitely a boy." Krystal concluded with a knowing smirk.