Baby Cakes

The following confession may surprise you.

After all, I am the writer of a highly pretentious food blog -and I’m clearly obsessed with dessert.  I drink homogenized chocolate milk, have ice cream for dinner, use bar chocolate prn, and I’m the self-proclaimed pioneer of the frozen cupcake.  Then again, none of those sweets are homemade.  I guess it will be up to you to determine if I am a food fraud, an ingredient imposter, a kitchen con artist, or a chocolate charlatan.  Here goes.

I have never baked a cake.
Well, I guess that’s not true either (perhaps add ‘liar’ to my list of cooking-related credentials).  I have baked a cake, specifically of the Duncan Hines variety - two Duncan Hines cakes, actually, including chocolate and Angel’s Food (the famous fat-free cake of the eighties, and therefore my childhood).  But then technically it wasn’t really I who baked them; it was the oven.  What I mean to say is I’ve never made a cake, like, from scratch.  If you’re sitting there thinking Who has?? then you’re like me about two weeks ago.  I was squarely in the pre-contemplative stage until I witnessed my notably masculine companion build not one but two whole cakes, totally from the ground up!  (Of course, I must compare and contrast our mothers, and blame my own for a non-existent baking education.  Or, on second thought, thank her sincerely.  Given my natural affinity for hunting and gathering desserts, my acquiring the skills to produce them has dangerous potential. )

As you can imagine, watching my companion baking cakes was inspiring on multiple levels.  Plus, I took it upon myself to make the icing for him and I did a really fantastic job- even though I had never tried my hand at frostings, glazes, or fondants either!  This prompted me to think maybe I could be more than just a surrogate mother to cakes.  (Or, if in the Duncan Hines scenario the oven is the surrogate mom, then maybe I could be more than a lowly and vainglorious middle man- more than, say, a doctor.)  Maybe I could actually make a cake, like how people make babies!  Yes, that’s exactly what I mean to say.  As babies are made from scratch, so would be my cake.  And it would look like any number of perfect Jolie-Pitts.

The first step in my cake-making process was to select the kind of cake to make.  Naturally I turned to The Joy Of Cooking, the most anthropological of humanity’s cookbooks.  I like The Joy Of Cooking because it reads like a manual for aliens posing as highly domestic humans.  As I often relate to myself as an alien posing as a human, I like to read the Joy Of Cooking and remark on how ambitious and civilized I am.  And there is nothing more ambitious and civilized than making a cake.  This is where cake-making actually transcends baby-making, where it seems ambition and civility make negative contributions.

Humanity’s Cake Choices, as listed in the JOC, are limited, but they all seem delicious and fundamental to the success of mankind.  To select just one, I adopted the strategy of first eliminating the options that baffled me by calling for an alleged ‘cream of tartar’ (which my mother explained by telephone has nothing to do with tartar sauce; it is apparently a stabilizing ingredient, one that I remained unwilling to buy in a whole tube or jar just to get the required ¼ teaspoon).  This ingenious process substantially thinned the choices and finally allowed my eyes to fall upon the ambitiously-named Golden Cake.  Of course, I immediately wanted to make this recipe and call the baby cake either Golden Boy or Golden Girl.  And I would have, too, if it didn’t turn out Golden Cake requires EIGHT egg yolks.  Well, my friends, I have nothing against delicious, rich egg yolks in a cake – but I am an inexperienced baker and I wasn’t looking to waste all of the eggs in the house.  I settled on Devil’s Food.  As the writer of this blog, it now seems I could have saved some time in choosing.  

Out of the oven, my first Devil’s Food Cake, Baby Cakes, first appeared to me as somewhat…not worth my hours of frenzied labor.  I had a hard time getting her out of the pan and even from her fallen crumbs I determined she had been overcooked (not JOC’s fault, but that of my oven, which makes out of every nightly cooking operation An Evening At the Improv).  I also had decided to ice her with chocolate butter cream, substituting Bailey’s Irish Cream for milk- which seemed my own personal genius at the time, but I kind of ended up just wishing for plain chocolate.

Since I didn’t necessary love the cake, I began to wonder if it was worth all the calories to eat the whole thing. Then I started to worry that I couldn’t even pawn the cake off on undiscerning children, since I had put alcohol in the frosting.  At this point, I wondered briefly if I should go give the cake to one of the street people outside the apartment.  But I didn’t, as a result of my ongoing fear of giving homemade food to homeless people.  (Here is my rationale: I am worried that the homeless person will coincidentally die of non-food-related causes, but that someone, perhaps an enemy or a senile old person, will remember a weird lady giving the blameless victim an entire cake and I will somehow, after a series of coincidences, hijinks, and misunderstandings, be charged with murder. This is my concern. My donations are thus limited to restaurant leftovers.) To put off the decision-making process, I cut the cake into small pieces and put it in the freezer.

And that is how I came to love my first cake as one must love any first baby.  Frozen cake and frozen icing continue to strike me as true miracles of life. The process hides any imperfections in the cake and totally elevates the texture of the frosting! My love for frozen cupcakes has become my love for frozen cake.

Baby Cakes doesn't look anything like the cakes of my dreams.

Isn’t she beautiful?