Eight days after Thanksgiving, I’m sure you are sick of turkey.

Turkey leftovers transformed into turkey casserole, turkey sandwiches, turkey salad. I’ve even seen a recipe for a lo-cal Tex-Mex turkey chili.

As we trade in the turkey for the tinsel, I’d like to share my Thanksgiving escapades with you. After all, it will make the mediocre cooks feel better about their abilities. And that’s what I’m here for.

As many of you know, my family is in Pennsylvania. While I had multiple invitations to spend the holiday with friends and loved ones, I opted to spend the day at home, truly thankful for a day off. This wouldn’t be a Tara-story if there wasn’t some procrastination involved, though.

Thanksgiving morning I awoke and decided I was going to cook my own dinner. After a quick call to my grandmother to determine the difference between self-rising flour and (the misleading) all-purpose flour, I went to WalMart dressed to impress in my sweats, and whispered a prayer of thanks when I realized the crowds were sparse. Apparently Thanksgiving procrastination is unheard of.

By 11:45 I was putting my from-the-bag-to-the-oven turkey in the stove. A few hours later, the thermometer popped up, and miraculously my broccoli casserole, mashed potatoes, rolls and stuffing finished at the same time. I successfully transformed the turkey juices into a delicious gravy.

Thankfully after finishing my very large plate of food, I was overly stuffed. Thankfully because my seven-layer chocolate cake dessert was a matter of trial-and-error.

You see, I apparently forgot to include at least one ingredient. I became aware I was missing cocoa when the chocolate cake appeared vanilla.

I added a cup of cocoa, and the coloring improved.

But that was not the end of my trial-and-error. Of course not.

My most glaring mistake was that my cake batter was very dry. Just a bunch of flour, sugar and buttermilk. Alas, I forgot to add water to my buttermilk powder. Who knew!

Ok, apparently everyone else knew. But I didn’t.

For those of you who are not connoisseurs of powder buttermilk mixture, you must add water. The recipe called for a cup or two of buttermilk. I added a cup or two of buttermilk powder.

Once I realized my taste-altering mistake, I attempted to “cover up” for the mistake by adding water. Of course, math was never my area of expertise, so I couldn’t figure out how much water I needed to negate the effect of the large amount of buttermilk powder. Despite my mathematical weakness, I was pretty sure if I added that much water I would be having a chocolate soup for dessert, however.

So, like the cocoa, I added a cup of water.

In my defense, I didn’t want to waste all the ingredients I had already used in the cake batter mixture, so I tried to fix it as best I could, and I began to bake my seven layers of cake.

After drizzling on the rich chocolate frosting (which turned out perfect, thank you), the now-four-layer chocolate cake appeared appetizing.

A few hours after feasting on my Thanksgiving dinner, I finally (thought) I had room for the cake. I was determined to at least taste it.

It was incredibly rich, but it was edible. For the record, the entire cake has been eaten, happily, so apparently it wasn’t that bad.

Now that December has arrived, we can begin to prepare for Christmas. Maybe in a week or so, when Christmas gets closer, the radio stations can start to play holiday music. Whoops, too late for that.

I actually decorated my Christmas tree this past weekend. (No procrastination there.)

It felt odd to be putting up a tree in November. It seemed growing up I spent a majority of my time with my grandmother and she never put her tree up until Christmas Eve. I don’t know many people who have held onto that tradition, but it always helped make the holiday more sentimental as she reminisced about each ornament and the snow fell outside.