Anyone else remember wacky cakes? When I was a kid, a neighbor gave my mom an easy chocolate cake recipe called wacky cake because it didn’t have any eggs. Instead, the wet ingredients were oil, vinegar and water. The unconventional ingredients worked together with the flour, cocoa powder and other ingredients to make a surprisingly moist, delicious cake.

My mom always told me we had to use a square cake pan, mix the dry ingredients, then make three holes in in the dry ingredients: one hole for oil, one for vinegar, and one for water. She said the shape of the pan was her secret.

When I was grew up and moved out, my grandmother gave me two of her old, square tin baking pans from her collection because I said I wanted to make square wacky cake, in my new apartment. I still have those little pans. Lately, I’ve been craving the comfort of that square cake. I want to feel the familiar scrape of the fork along the bottom of the pan when I mix everything together.

Thinking about wacky cake and what makes it special got me thinking about how I could “wacky cake” my writing when I’m in a slump. I could use an unconventional setting or give a character unconventional habits. I could challenge myself to use a list of words to create a story. The list of switch-a-roos I could use in my writing is endless. But the thing that makes wacky cake writing different is that I’m going to take a few unconventional elements and put them into a familiar container (like the square tin pan) to shape my writing.

I’m not exactly sure how it will turn out, but I’m hopeful that I’m going to have a delicious new story when I’m finished with my wacky cake writing this week.