Today is my daughter-in-law's birthday. This morning, while baking her birthday cake, I was reminded of the first time I made this recipe. I had mixed up all the dry ingredients, made a well and then added all of the liquid ingredients except for the last one as directed in the recipe.
The batter mixed up beautifully. Perfect. Now I was ready for the final step. Before putting the batter into the pans I was supposed to add 1 cup of boiling water to the mix. I did so and...
I paused for a moment and stared at the runny liquid. I had never seen a cake batter that looked like that. I consulted my recipe again and double-checked my ingredients and measurements. Everything appeared to be right but this batter. This just simply did not look right!
I am glad that I had read the reviews for this recipe. It had rave reviews for the most part but there were several negative reviews. It seems that the negative reviewers all complained about how the cake batter had been too runny so they decided to "fix" the recipe by adding more flour and cocoa until it reached what they considered to be the right consistency. In other words, they did not follow the directions. They changed them to suit their perspective.
If they would have taken time to read the reviews like I did, they would have discovered that this cake was based off a recipe known as "The Hershey Syrup Cake". Nowadays, this cake calls for Hershey's chocolate syrup but in this recipe, the chocolate syrup is formed when you add the boiling water to the mixture.
I glanced at it dubiously as I poured it into the gresed and floured pans I had prepared. I slipped the pans into the oven and held my breath. Thirty-five minutes later, my cakes were finished. After they had cooled for 10 minutes, I turned them out of the pans and let them finish cooling before frosting them with a butter cream frosting and decorating the cake. The cake was perfect and everyone loved it. Why? Because I followed the directions even when they didn't make sense.
Often God's directions don't quite make sense to us. We think we are not hearing them correctly. We think things don't "look" right so we decide to tweak them a bit according to our likes and dislikes. Then when we see the results, we blame God rather than admit that we did NOT follow God's directions.
It is always best to follow God's directions exactly. Are we?
Blessings!
K
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