When I was twenty-four, I decided to bake a cake for my boyfriend’s birthday. Matty was a wannabe rock star and the coolest guy I’d ever dated. I really wanted to pull off something cool, something special, something his mother would never have made. The limits of my first apartment kitchen forced my creativity into overdrive. I baked three cakes—chocolate, yellow, and marble—with the only pan I had: a loaf pan. I then inverted these “cake bricks” and stacked them, one on top of the other. Covering the cake wall with orange and brown frosting wasn’t easy, and it ended up leaning a little to the left, so I jammed a chopstick in the middle for support. The final touches involved throwing random tosses of sprinkles at the cake, embedding green plastic army men into the frosting (they were “scaling” the cake), draping candy necklaces around the edges, and spelling out “I Dig You” in those sugary cake-decoration letters. It was an ugly, towering, behemoth. It was a sugar bomb. It was my whole weird heart on a plate.
But that’s the thing about cake, isn’t it? Any cake, be it torte or gâteau, sheet or layer, red velvet or devil’s food, is a gift. Weddings and birthdays are a given, but the surprise presentation of a cake on a Tuesday, following an average chicken dinner, has the ability to turn the night into something special. That first boyfriend cake, which has come to be known as Crazy Cake 1.0, opened my eyes to the power of this confection. It makes people giddy, it lets them dream: It’s a sweet escape from the ordinary.
Cakes have been tied to the cycles of human life since ancient times. The Chinese celebrate their harvest with the mid-autumn Moon Festival. In honor of Chang’e, the goddess who lives on the moon, people exchange mooncakes stuffed with sweet or savory fillings. Ancient Celts celebrated spring with Beltane cakes, which were representative of the returning sun. These cakes were not only eaten and enjoyed, but rolled down the hill in a game of fortune-telling: If your cake reached the bottom intact, it was a year of luck for you.
Traditionally, cakes were reserved for special occasions because their creation required special skills and the finest, most expensive ingredients from the kitchen. The wealthy enjoyed the fantastic and elaborate cakes more often, but people in the average world still found at least one day a year worthy of a humble cake. The birthday cake wasn’t a popular practice until the late 1800s. Mass production made baking ingredients cheaper to buy, and new railroads made them easier to get. Modern advances gave cooks extra time and new conveniences, like innovative leavening agents such as baking soda and baking powder, about the same time that “Happy Birthday to You” was composed.
And yet, a cake is more than fine ingredients. During leaner years, people learned to make do without high-quality staples. Recipes for butterless, eggless, and/or milkless cakes call for lard, mayonnaise, water, honey, and vinegar as substitutes. These cakes, with names like Depression Cake and War Cake, prove that even in the toughest times, when you need cake, you need cake.
It wasn’t until after World War II that dear Betty Crocker turned the world of cake upside down. Dry mixes for biscuits, custards, and gelatin had been around for years by the time General Mills debuted its first cake mix in 1947. Oddly enough, the cake mix wasn’t an instant hit. While it was fine to make biscuits in a flash, cooks had a hard time reconciling the speed and ease of a mix with what a cake should be. A cake needed to be a labor of love; the creation itself deserved to be an event. Recognizing this, General Mills retooled its mixes so that it became necessary to break a few eggs into the bowl. That must have been enough of a contribution, because today most cakes made in the home come from a boxed mix.
As far as I’m concerned, cake mix has its merits. After Crazy Cake 1.0, there have been many new versions. I’ve baked a nine-layer, striped, Cat-in-the-Hat monstrosity, a three-layer sprawling spider (with black frosting), a five-layer pink bachelorette cake (complete with protruding elements). All of them were made from a mix. They’re reliable, they’re consistent, they’re dummy-proof, and people always comment on how moist they are. I usually tell them it’s an old post-war recipe.
“Scratch” cakes, by contrast, have become my biggest challenge. My initial desire to create amazing structures from cake has led to my desire to create cakes that, in terms of their ingredients, are beautifully structured from the inside out. But while baking from scratch may be more in fashion these days, it hasn’t gotten any easier. Most baking projects are veritable scientific experiments: If one element is out of whack, you get a sunken center or overly dry grain. But I continue to find new cakes to bake. There needn’t always be an event in mind—sometimes just a little lull in everyday excitement is enough for a cake to slip in and remedy things. I am now a woman of dense and buttery poundcake, rich, dark Sacher tortes, light-as-air pavlovas, and moist, tender chiffon cakes. I plow forward because I know that, in the end, even a lopsided cake will be a well-loved gift.
Wacky Cake II
A modern version of Depression Cake
1 1/2 cups sifted flour
1 cup sugar
4 tablespoons cocoa powde r
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup cold water
Pre-heat oven to 350. Sift flour, sugar, cocoa, soda, and salt together into an ungreased 8 x 8 inch pan. Dig three wells in the dry ingredients. In the first well, pour oil. In the second, pour vinegar, and in the third, pour vanilla. Pour water over everything and stir to combine, do not beat. Bake 30 minutes, cake should be springy. Eat it warm with no frosting or just a dollop of sweetened mascarpone.
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