On Cake

I've been pretty into baking cakes. Cakes, cupcakes, some with fillings, different flavors of frostings...always from scratch. I love making cakes from the raw ingredients because somehow then it's really yours. A creation. And since I'm not really crafty or creative otherwise, this is a nice (and tasty) outlet for me. Don't get me wrong, I've had plenty of disasters and I am in no way a cake decorator. It's always slightly lopsided and never perfectly frosted, but I don't care. It's the process, not the product that makes me the happiest.

I've been reading this book series and one of the characters in the book is renown for her orange marmalade cake and is a very funny little lady. Her thoughts on cake made me laugh and resonated with my soul...

"It was hard, very hard, when people couldn't - and, in today's world wouldn't - eat cake. When she was coming up, families lived from cake to cake. A cake was a special event, it meant something. Now a homemade, baked from scratch cake meant next to nothing. For one thing, most young people had never experienced such a thing. All they'd ever known was bought from a store and tasted like hamster shavings, or had been emptied from a box into a bowl, stirred with low fat milk, and shoved into an oven that nearly blew a fuse from being turned on in the first place. Such a cake could never be your cake, no way, it would be Betty Crocker's or Duncan Hines's cake, and the difference between yours and theirs was vast and unforgivable.

And look how people acted these days at the mere sight of a piece of cake. Cake? Get it out of here! I'm on a diet! I don't want it in the house! Worse yet was the inevitable declaration: I never eat cake!

Never touch cake. Pathetic! The world was increasingly filled with such people, not to mention the crowd that ate cake in secret, stuffing it in their faces when nobody was looking, and claiming to nourish themselves on a diet of boiled eggs and dry toast. She knew who they were."

Now, this is NOT some judgement on box and store bought cakes. You gotta do what you gotta do when you're supposed to arrive somewhere in 30 minutes with cupcakes. Or if you just plain don't enjoy baking. I get it.

Here is the one I made today for my husband to celebrate six years of wedded bliss (it's been bliss, right Kurt?!) Three layer yellow cake, coffee frosting with chocolate chips. If I make it again, I would definitely do it with chocolate cake, but that's what I've made the last few times so I wanted to change my tune.

I know what's for breakfast tomorrow...