Questioning.

I routinely hit Earl up with random questions, derived from the thoughts that are floating around my head at a given moment. For example, one of my friends on Facebook just posted a picture of a Red Velvet Cake that had been made from scratch.

This concerned me.

The reason that Red Velvet Cake concerns me is I can’t figure out how the cake becomes red. This is one of the reasons that I don’t naturally select Red Velvet Cake as a dessert delectable. I pondered this for a moment, randomly deducing that beet juice might be involved, when I decided to bark out.

“I don’t understand what makes a Red Velvet Cake red!” My voice might have been distressed sounding, because I had pondered this for a few moments and couldn’t come up with an answer. I didn’t want to resort to Google because I didn’t want to be bombarded with suggestions for connecting with Red Velvet Cake and it’s people on Google Plus.

Earl calmly looked up at me and gave me the mellow “What?” gaze.

“How do they make the Red Velvet Cake red?” My voice had ramped back a notch in distress.

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

Quite frankly, I was now terrified because I thought that maybe blood would be involved and that just didn’t seem, well, I don’t know, healthy. Or American. Maybe it would be more American than healthy if there was blood involved but I didn’t want to get wrapped up in a political debate.

“They burn the chocolate.”

“Red Velvet Cake is chocolate?”

“Yes.”

He went back to watching a political campaign ad, leaving me to ponder why anyone would want to burn a perfectly good piece of chocolate just to make it red.