Thanksgiving is disorderly. The turkey comes out splay-legged if you don't truss it with twine, which is impossible without squinting at a Youtube tutorial, which inevitably leads to smearing your mom's iPad with raw turkey slime while you pause and rewind and try to figure out how the hell to make a surgeon's knot.
Two people will inevitably bring cranberry sauce and make everyone else vote on which one tastes better. One of them will be pickled with ginger bits, meaning it tastes good but is not really cranberry sauce. Someone will pass you a small plate with pecan pie and pumpkin cheesecake and you'll find yourself scooping maple ice cream on top of the whole thing, even though three strong flavors taste good individually but not together, but you are not going to let that stand in your way, you are going to let everything melt into a glob anyway and press fork tine tracks all over it because you're too full to eat it but it is literally your only purpose in life right now.
The antidote to this hours-long state of disorder, I learned yesterday, is watching trade videos for industrial cake-finishing equipment. Before we really get into it, consider that these are the types of cakes that you see sitting under the glass in the "bakery" corner of KeyFoods or Stop n' Shop. You wonder how long they've been sitting there, and how the frosting grooves got so parallel. You'd never catch yourself craving a slice of one of these things, but you might buy one as a last-ditch birthday present for a friend, and get something scrawled on it in green gel icing like "GOOD FOR YOU" or "I LOVE YOU BRO."
The best part of these cakes is that they aren't really food. Instead, they are rotund mounds of flour and baking powder and sugar and ambiguously-died frostings. They are perfect. They are family-friendly. They are indisputable. They are apolitical. They are the anti-disorder.
Luckily for you, there are hundreds of these videos. According to my sister, they are a therapeutic procrastination tool. They also have instrumental techno-lite music that you can mute and cover up with your own Relaxation/Digestion Playlist. (This is not an endorsement for Unifiller Systems Inc., which seems to have this corner of the cake-decorating market on lock.)
Inhale.
Exhale.
Rinse.
Repeat.
