Seven years after her father’s disappearance, Diamond Newberry and her mother are struggling, but Diamond’s observations provide comic leavening.

They are also what make it rise in the absence of other leavening agents.

You would think all the leavening would make it light, but the weight of the other ingredients created 4-pound pancakes, which were so thick that the inside could only cook if the outside was burnt.

“Temperature is part of the chemical reaction process for baked goods made with a leavening agent, such as baking powder,” nutrition and wellness educator Jenna Smith wrote for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign extension website.

Attending nuns push not gurneys but shopping carts, leavening the tragic with the mundane.