Nobody Does it Like Sandra Lee

In general, I’m pretty dichotomous about the shows I watch on the Food Network. Paula Dean and Alton Brown: yes; Rachael Ray and Emeril: no. But there are a couple shows that hover in the middle, like Good Eats and, more recently, Sandra Lee's show. Her shtick is that she makes “semi-homemade” things: meals and baked goods using pre-made products and mixes. She is utterly fascinating to watch, because she somehow manages to take generally innocuous items, like Pillsbury crescent rolls, and make them the most disgusting thing possible using a lot of time and other random ingredients. Seemingly, her tolerance for partially hydrogenated soybean oil is limitless.

But, even knowing what we do about Sandra Lee, J and I were just aghast at this weekend’s episode, where she made holiday cakes. These may go down in history as the worst concoctions ever to have been brought to fruition. Witness: the Hanukkah cake.

The fact that she’s even making something as inane as a freakin’ Hanukkah cake already had me on edge. News flash: when you impose your crappy, commercialized version of holiday cheer onto another religion, it is not a compliment. You are not doing something nice. And halfway through this recipe, I had to wonder if Sandra Lee knew this and was just decided to push the envelope anyway, because this cake was not meant for consumption. It starts off as a store-bought angel food Bundt cake. She dyes some canned frosting blue, but before spreading it on the cake, she STUFFS MARSHMALLOWS IN THE BUNDT CAKE HOLE. Then she ices it. Then she makes a Star of David out of fake pearls and jams it in the middle. Ta-da! I would show a picture of this, but it isn’t on the website. Maybe because this recipe wasn’t a real recipe, but something inspired by Cliff Huxtable.

She then breaks up the insanity by making a fairly harmless Christmas cake, that still manages to be completely disgusting. She ices another angel food cake with some pastel green frosting, covers the whole thing in shredded coconut (“Like snow!”) and decorates it with marzipan leaves she just happens to have in her cabinet, and red gel that looks like Halloween blood.

But then…the Kwanzaa Celebration Cake. This is Sandra Lee at her best, making something utterly time consuming and disgusting, but ultimately really ugly, too! She starts off with the same angel food Bundt cake, but slices it into two layers. To a bowl of canned frosting, she adds cocoa, cinnamon, vanilla and mixes it up. As she proceeds to put the whole bowl’s worth on the bottom layer she assures us that “this is everyone’s favorite part, so use a lot! You can always make more!” After replacing the top layer and frosting the whole thing, she gets out a can of apple pie filling. At this point, J and I stop gagging enough to yell, “Nooo!” at the television. But it is too late; Sandra Lee has filled in the Bundt hole with glops of canned pie filling.

If you think she is done, then you are thinking this is merely a Hanukkah cake. No, people; THIS is a Kwanzaa Celebration Cake and the decorations are only just beginning. She pours a bowlful of shelled acorns over the whole cake, followed by handfuls of green pumpkin seeds. We are lucky because the online recipe has replaced the acorns with A PACKAGE OF CORN NUTS and added popcorn. So the ideal Kwanzaa Celebration Cake now holds Corn Nuts, popped popcorn, and pumpkin seeds. And the cake would not be complete without gigantic Kwanzaa candles, which she dutifully jams into the cake.

So whatever holiday atrocities may enter your life this season, let us all give thanks that Sandra Lee isn’t invited to dinner.