I was about 11 and my mom fled a abusive relationship. Didn't really have a plan but we started in Oregon and ended up in Utah. We were getting survivors benefits from Social Security and ran out of cash. So we had to kill a few weeks in until the next check came in.

So we stayed at a battered woman's shelter in Cedar City. Lovely place, lovely people. Everyone helped out cooking. It was a small place, maybe 20 woman and children there and a few staff.

But one night my mom volunteered to make a cake. I remember this vividly. It was a Cherry Chip cake from a box and there was a thing of vanilla frosting. I ended up adding the ingredients and mixing them up. So the cake goes in the oven and bakes and something is wrong. I forgot to add eggs into the batter. So we ended up with gross sludge.

People were nice about but you could tell everyone was really disappointed. And cake was a luxury, it wasn't like we could go out and grab another one.

I'm going on 20+ years of mailing them cash with a note saying to buy cake.