I once screwed up a batch of ginger molasses cookies so severely I avoided going in the kitchen for nearly a week, as the smell of my baking disaster lingered and my dad broke off pieces of massive, flat ginger cookies languishing on the baking sheet. They never even made it to the wire rack.
I’ve always found baking more finicky and less forgiving than cooking. It’s less intuitive, and it’s taken me a lot longer to feel good at it, to find the handful of things I can confidently craft.
So I don’t really know why I offered to bake my friend Melissa a birthday cake. I was doing Dry January at the time, so I can’t exactly blame the Eins Zwei Zero Non-Alcoholic Pinot Noir (linking because it’s a delicious zero proof red that I highly recommend).
I’d never even made a layer cake before. They’re very trendy and I’m inundated with images of them on Pinterest, but I am not a huge cake girl. I like making cobbler, or soft pretzels, or scones. I don’t care too much about making my baking beautiful, and these kinds of cakes seem to be predicated on looking beautiful – the flavour comes second to the Instagramability. A baking-induced meltdown seemed inevitable. I recall many icing-related meltdowns in the kitchen of my shitty Whyte ave basement suite, struggling to frost cupcakes for sorority socials.
The whole “layer cake is about aesthetics, not flavour” could easily be spun into some asinine metaphor about relationships and beauty and striving for perfection and the masks we all wear, not least of all because Melissa is a friend from my sorority days. But it wouldn’t really make sense. It wouldn’t be truthful.
My original plan for the birthday cake was to make a heart-shaped chocolate cake with little red piped hearts all over – which went out the window when Melissa texted me that she wanted a Shrek cake for her birthday. The little hearts were replaced with green fondant Shrek ears (?). Those are his ears, right?
This is what Pinterest psy-oped me into wanting to make.
So this was not only my first layer cake, but my first experiment with fondant, and green food colouring, and at this point I’m freaking out.
I love baking and cooking (I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t) but I never devoted much time to the theory, or the terms, or learning to do it the proper way. When it comes to anything creative or generative, my preference is to follow my woman’s intuition. I trust my gut on what good writing sounds like, or what a good dish tastes like, and I’ll figure out the rest from there. I’ll pick up the rules, but what I’m most interested in is seeing what I can make with what I’ve got.
But a birthday cake asks me to be someone different. Birthday cake asks me to be one of those Instagram girlies who knows how to whip up a casual olive oil clementine curd and obsesses over crumb. I’m just not that type of baker! I’m a good enough girlie! The only goal is to make something worth eating! It doesn’t have to change the world!
Baking is about patience. I’m many things, but patient isn’t one of them. I like things to be done and settled and checked off the list. I dislike ambiguity. I dislike waiting. This is why I didn’t get into baking bread during the pandemic. I’m too eager to slice into that loaf fresh out of the oven.
Layer cake, unlike its unpretentious and uncomplicated cousin, muffins, takes forever. You have to let the cakes cool. You have to let the icing set before you put the next layer on. My practice cake was supposed to be three layers – unfortunately, in my haste to make the cake, one layer fell apart when I tried to remove it from the pan before it was sufficiently cooled. But one less layer made for less waiting.
At least I enjoyed ripping off chunks of cake and eating it like Bruce Bogtrotter in Matilda.
I haven’t kept in touch with many girls from my sorority. For the most part, they’re kind of like work friends – it made sense at one time and place to be friends, and then it stopped making sense. I grew beyond what the petty interpersonal politics and Panhellenic meetings and secret passwords could teach me. Honestly, the biggest thing I learned from being in a sorority is how to co-exist with people I don’t like, and who don’t like me.
Melissa is one of those rare Pi Phi friends that never left, that never faded away. This says a lot more about her than it does about me. Few friends survived my mid-twenties. The ones that did probably deserve a medal. Or at least a chocolate birthday cake, covered in green frosting, topped with fondant ears and candles.
So that’s what Melissa got.