Ruminations on Cake

I have always hated cakes.  When I was growing up, my mother, who was a fount of domestic creativity in all respects, used to make me birthday pie instead of cake.  Usually, I would request chocolate cream.  Once I remember a chocolate mint cream pie, and once I remember a fluffy coconut cream pie, like some kind of divine, edible cloud.  My favorite was the bucket of dirt.  At my 5^th birthday party, she presented me with a bucket of chocolate pudding, crumbled Oreo cookies (the cookie part, not the cream filling – one of my siblings probably got to eat all the cream filling), with gummy worms dangling over the edges.  My mother was creative like that.  All the time.  I find my creative parenting skills stretched when it comes to things like that.  Luckily, my child likes cake, although he tends to request rather complicated cakes (a volcano, a dinosaur, etc). 

Anyway, when I got married, I wanted a gigantic wedding pie.  I modified my request to a “pie tree”.  My husband had carved a wooden “tree” from an actual tree on the property on which we were living at the time.  From the trunk, he fastened hand carved wooden “branches”, and on each branch (there were 7, I think), there was a flat dish that was to have a pie. As it turned out, pies were too flat to have the right visual affect, and we went with 7 different cakes after all.  It was a beautiful cake tree.  I have a Martha Stewart style photograph of a little girl in a dress standing in awe of the cake tree.  The little girl later came up to me and told me I shouldn’t be smoking, since it was bad for me.  I tossed my veil out of my eyes again, and told the girl thank-you for caring about me, and lifted my wedding dress skirts and wandered off, taking another drag.  It was not a Martha Stewart moment, but hey, it was my wedding and I was getting really tipsy.

I think what I don’t like is cheap, stupid cake.  I think I’m a cake snob.  I can’t stand the sheet cakes that come from Albertsons that are always showing up for some work colleague’s birthday or bridal shower, or goodbye, or whatever.  And you have to choke down a hunk of what tastes like a dried up sponge with a pile of sugar paste on top of it.  I really can’t abide cheap frosting.  Lard with sugar and food coloring.  It’s hideous.  But you have to eat a piece because it’s impolite not to, and someone might think you’re trying to lose weight and hate you because you really aren’t even fat, and what do you think you’re doing trying to look so disciplined, you bitch, eat the fucking cake.  Or they might think that you aren’t really happy to celebrate their pregnancy or their birthday or their graduation, since you aren’t actually participating in this bland and tasteless rite of passage, and who do you think you are, Miss High and Mighty, eat the fucking cake.  And so I eat the fucking cake.