Wonderful construct! The creamy, spongy, sweet and velvety heaven in every spoonful/bite, full of luscious delight! I am of course talking about the gooey ones with the right oomph 😁
The beautiful stuff needs to be worshipped! What a small little geometric pack of sensual pleasure! Beautiful to look at and every bite a treat to the pallet… a smooth slide down the gullet and the blissful feel of satiation. At times, one should buy a perfectly iced cake just for self and have it, don’t wait for birthdays and those miserably thin slices that are passed around.
But again, birthdays without cakes, can’t imagine! Although we in India are into this sudden purist revival with many professing that cake is a western influence and should be replaced with the Indian style sweets/ halwa/ payasam et al! Why? If you can wear western trousers, you must eat cakes too! (No bread analogy here although Me knows da Marie Antoinette stuff 😅)
An incident oft told by my parents involving ‘yours truly’ that turned into an issue within seconds also revolved round the innocent cake! I was seven and my friend was turning seven. I was at his place for his birthday party. As is the nature of moms, mine too left me unguided and sauntered busily into the kitchen to help the hostess. The pride piece of the party was sitting atop the dining table with festoons highlighting its creamy, chocolatey swirls and layers. The birthday boy too was finding it difficult to hold onto his horses. He kept expressing his anguish of “the long wait” to cut it and gorge on it… I couldn’t agree more! So we experimentally circled the table. Then we circled the ‘beauty’ with our forefingers to lift any wayward specs of cream or crumb. This circling continued while we kept innocently cleaning the periphery. Aeons passed.
In marched the moms with tray-loads of party food. They must have taken a very long time loading these trays I guess as our finger circling exercise had brought us to the epicentre sometime back and we were hiding right there under the table!! A mega-cyclone descended on us. Oh yeah, you guessed it right. The whole birthday cake was sitting in our stomachs in even halves. Sourcing another cake in a jiffy was the issue at hand. Both the dads were made to run to the neighborhood bakery, an off the counter cake was brought in. Rest is not history. I was warned off others’s birthday cakes everytime I left to attend a birthday party… for so many more years!
But , now it’s not the old story with me anymore. The thin slivers still get passed on but who cares! Like I said, I buy myself a cake for the sheer bliss of enjoying it at leisure with a “my kind of slice” and without much thought to calories, sugar, fat and the blah-blahs. This is one of my favourite things. Totally guilt free.
After the “Chicken soup…”, need someone to come up with”cakes for the soul!”😄
Heartfelt 