Learn From It

Cake!

Yeah, on that kick again. Well, shoot me. I have the time, and the box mix, and it's one of the few physical things I can do to any sense of completion, so I made another cake. This one is a yellow “butter recipe” cake with chocolate frosting.

So I had to go for a 13x9 cake than a layer cake because, well, easier. Helloooo.

Those are easy to frost because you really just need to drop all the frosting in the middle of the cake and spread it out to the corners. Also quick. And easy.

Except this is where “easy” gives out to “gay” (just when you thought “easy” and “gay” were complementary!). I simply had to swirl a pattern into the frosting. I was always trying to get my mom to make layer cakes instead of 13x9 cakes and when I did manage to convince her to buy the round pans and make the damn thing, I'd try so hard to get the frosting to look like the box that I'd end up tearing up the cake by the time I was done. Leading to never using the round cake pans again and going back to 13x9 pans until the tragedy was forgotten and then, well, lather, rinse, repeat (which reminds me, I once did sit through the first Lord of the Rings movie).

So I empty the can of chocolate frosting into the middle of the box cake (oh, how I relish that imagery) and spread it out to get even coverage using the knife in just one direction to avoid ruining the cake (a gay boy learns a lot from his earlier mistakes, at least in baking), and then I'm swirling a certain pattern into just the surface of the frosting before I know what I'm doing. That done, I dragged the knife around the entire perimeter making a flat border.

Then it hit me: I had just fashioned into that 13x9 rectangle the same design that my father Jack, the stone mason, fashions into each concrete form he pours. He makes a sort of squiggle pattern across a slab of concrete using a nylon-bristled broom and then uses a special type of rectangular trowel called an edger (brotherman Sam will correct me on that term if I'm misremembering it) to frame each sidewalk with a flat surface.

I bet you didn't know there was a sort of signature to poured concrete sidewalks. Next time you're walking down the street, just look down! (well, unless you're in San Francisco, because they only pour small squares everywhere with nothing interesting about them).

So the cake tastes ok, but as soon as I took the first bite I remember why my mother never went in for the “butter recipe” cakes. They taste, well, like butter. Once again, the wisdom of Marie trumps the superficial application of cultural faggotry.

Maybe that's why we shun box cakes?

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