Let Them Eat Cake

Cake. How many delightful flavors, textures and colors of cake can be created? Chocolate, banana, carrot, red velvet and, my absolute favorite, wedding cake!! How many designs? Sheet, layers, bundt, heart, square or cut, trimmed and molded into amazing shapes! Don’t even get me started on frosting! Buttercream, sour cream, cream cheese, ganache! Oh my!

My love of cooking, in general, comes from watching my mom cook and bake. I remember her making special, decorated cakes. One year she made a black cat cake for our Halloween party. Another year, she made PacMan and Mrs. PacMan cakes for the school carnival cake walk. Those PacMan cakes sure were cool! All the kids wanted to win one! But, my favorite thing she baked was fresh from our garden zucchini bread! I can still remember the smell as it baked, the taste of it slathered with butter, hot from the oven. My mom always let me help when she cooked, and baked. That nurtured, within me, a joy of all things created with love. That is what my cakes are, a labor of love.

I have been creating cakes since I was a child, in the 80’s. Jell-o cakes and pudding cakes were all the rage at that time. I experimented with my first layer cake by making a white cake with a red gelatin layer and a green gelatin layer for Christmas one year. It was frosted with whipped topping and I piped red holly berries and green leaves on the top of it. I t hink it turned out quite spectacular, if I do say so myself! Wacky Cake is one of my all time favorites from my childhood baking. This cake is a dense, moist, depression era chocolate cake recipe that uses vinegar in place of eggs. My favorite frosting for this particular cake is boiled frosting with a white shortening base, sprinkled liberally with rainbow nonpareils. Yummo! I have made this cake throughout my life and now it is a favorite of MY grown children, from their childhood.

Wedding cakes are a lot of fun to make! It’s really cool to be able to design the cakes around the couple’s colors and theme! I love to see their faces when they see the final product on their big day! I have had the pleasure of making wedding cakes for my daughter, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, cousin, and family friends. Altogether, I have created 7 wedding cakes, which I have given to the couples for a wedding present.

These days, my favorite cakes are the ones I create with my Grandchildren. I have 10 grandkids, so that’s a lot of cakes! Basically, I let them pick the flavor and design. Sometimes, we have to come up with creative ways to copycat a design they pick from Google, especially if it is made with fondant. Yuck! Sorry, that’s my opinion of that stuff! We often use candy, buttercream, crisped rice treats, etc. in place of fondant. The kids always have the option of helping mix, bake and decorate, if possible. I have made 52 birthday cakes for my grandkids, and many more for other family members.

My favorite thing about creating cakes is the joy it allows me to give to others. It can be really intense and stressful when I’m in the thick of it! Ohhhhh, but when I get in my mode, creative juices flowing, I’m somewhere else entirely! Flavors! Colors! Shapes! A chance to prove what I can do! And when it all comes together, when I present my final product, it’s all worthwhile! Ahh, now I can rest until the next birthday or wedding masterpiece is dreamed up!

I hope that my joy of baking and creating cakes is something that is passed on to a younger generation, as it was passed on to me. I hope, by allowing my children and grandchildren to help me bake, that they feel comfortable experimenting and creating their own masterpieces someday. Maybe, just maybe, when I’m too old to bake, and I’m celebrating my birthday, someone will bake me a super special cake….and find the look of pure joy on my face.