I'm not a huge fan. Except for the icing or fluffy filling.
"I've spared myself the extra calories of carbs and sugar," I console my sugar-shocked mouth after swallowing the last creamy spoonful of frosting. Although carrot cake, Tres Leches and anything soaked in coconut get my vote.
Maybe I am a fan, after all.
Wherever we look, cake comes up. At birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, most every celebration except funerals, I would venture.
We stay longer at receptions and parties to have said piece of cake. It's the grand finale. The crowning glory. The grand focal point. And we praise those who can decorate them in buttercream roses, swirls, flower petals, swags and pointlets. Others sit in graceful sophistication, tailored with fondant, ganache or glace.
My mother loved to bake and decorate such a cake, though wanting in many other culinary skills, having been brought up with a cook and nursemaid.
On one birthday--my little girl guests fluttering in their petticoat skirts--she served a birthday dessert in the shape of a ladybug, having carved layer loaves into ovals and then icing them with dots and eyes and antennae. I must have been eight.
These are triumphs of cakes.
But cakes also suffer their tragedies.
Such as the callous response of the selfish French monarch, oblivious to the starving state of her subjects. "Let them eat _ _ _ _!" certainly gave cake a bad name.
Like the time my mother spent hours on a cake for a friend's event. Her beloved bakery creation traveled in the "far-away" (trunk) of our powder-blue station wagon. I also rode in the back, with the food. (Such were the times before seatbelt regulations). I made my five-year-old self comfortable on the trip, edging up to somethin soft and squishy, only to discover I'd situated my bottom on the precious pastry. I had sat on the cake. The cake that took so long to bake.
Although my mother never scolded me, the pall of disappointed as I emerged from the back of the car with a half-flattened cake, etched a deep ravine of guilt that stayed with me forever.
Some cakes fall. Some spill. Some get sat on. Some burn. Some over-rise, as in my favorite childhood book, The Duchess Bakes a Cake.
And some get immortalized in songs,
Melting in the dark
left out in the rain
the sweet, green icing flowing down
Jimmy Webb's epic four-verse song--with an extended instrumental--triumphed in 1968.
And here in 2026, the song, MacArthur Park, has enjoyed a re-bake by accompanying an American gold-medal ice skater in her Winter Olympic victory.
Ms. Liu chose the heart-stopping interpretation of the late, imitable Donna Summer.
Only Summer's soaring vocals could reverberate the transcendent joy of Liu's jubilant dance.
How appropriate. Another cake with which to celebrate this moment in artistic history!
The songwriter,
the singer,
the skater
Let's all linger at the party for a second slice of cake.
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