Betty Crocker gets tricky

I have to admit that I'm kind of in love with Betty Crocker's Baking's Believing: Authentic Magic Recipes Perform Feats of Oven Wizardry! Table Sorcery! Eating Enchantment! (created in consultation with Milbourne Christopher, "America's Foremost Magician"; undated, but an address inside does not include a zip code, so it's from early 1963 at the latest). I mean, just look at the cover.

If you can remain unmoved by endless subtitles punctuated with exclamation points AND a tiny wizard making paper birds fly out of a hat-shaped cake, your imagination must be made out of soda crackers and dead bugs. (Or maybe you're just a more convincing grown-up than I am. I don't know. I just needed to feel like somebody else was deficient instead of me.)

And yes, the book does indeed tell you how to make tiny paper birds "fly" out of a cherry-frosted hat cake.

Also, the hat should have a tiny, angry marshmallow rabbit on it to glare at the birds. Maybe it's jealous that the birds will get all the glory? In any case, I assumed that the audience for this booklet would be moms who wanted to make their little magic enthusiast's seventh birthday the best one ever.

Then the variations for the Abracadabra Dough made me question that assumption a bit.

I guess some kids might think optical illusions are cool...

But I don't know how excited kids are really going to be about cookies with varying types of lines on them... or teeny tiny hearts and stars that will only make kids long for the magical day in 1964 when Lucky Charms would first appear in grocery stores.

And then there's the horoscope-themed variation....

I feel tired just looking at all the work this one involves. Six colors of dough-- some to be used straight-up and some to be speckled into others. A dozen cookie cutters. One representative for each shape topped with a hand-crafted horoscope sign. Elaborate plating. Clearly this is a labor-intensive project... Maybe something to make in anticipation of hosting the swingers' party for the first time? The cookies can serve as an icebreaker and make it easier to pick partners based on the compatibility of their signs.

Or maybe the book is just meant to give bored and crafty homemakers something to do.

The Take-A-Card cookies, with their lengthy and repeated rests and double-sided egg paint designs, seem designed to convey to the bridge club that the host was going out of her mind with boredom.

And then I saw a couple pages of "tricks" that seemed to be meant for children to perform for their friends, like "The Winner."

This one seems guaranteed to make the kid performing the trick instantly lose their friends. Set up a bet about which side the match will land on and then bend it at the last second so it will land on its side? This is not even attempting to seem like magic-- just the wonder of someone being an asshole and changing the conditions of the trick at the last second.

And then there is "Number Wizardry."

It seems to assume that kids are just thrilled to have to do lengthy multiplication problems in their spare time (and also that they will be accurate with their math. I could definitely see myself feeling anxious about being asked to do a math problem for an audience and coming up with, say, 558,675,309 for the answer, both messing up the trick and embarrassing myself).

And speaking of tricks that will take a lot of effort for little payoff, there's also a trick asking the performer to perform a lengthy series of intricate cuts because "When you say that you can cut a hole large enough to put your head through, in a piece of paper the size of a playing card, your friends will be dubious."

And they will lose interest after a few seconds of watching you take tiny cuts in that piece of paper, which is probably for the best anyway, as even a small misstep is going to make the whole thing fall apart anyway....

And then once I was convinced that the booklet was for kids with industrial-strength levels of patience, a different trick made me return to the "preparing for a swingers' party" theory again.

Okay, okay, the more likely scenario would be that I as a kid would have wanted to try this one myself, announced that I was going to show off an "incredible penetration" and then have had no clue why everybody else was laughing.

In any case, this book did keep me laughing because I could never figure out who the intended audience was, but I liked considering the various possibilities. And now, for the amazing finale, I'm going to disappear!