Marie Antoinette is credited with having said “Let them eat cake” as the French peasants, her subjects, were begging for bread, and I’m inclined to agree, not with her luxuriant deafness to the real problems that led to the revolution, but with the dismissal, so long as the emphasis is placed on the right words: Let them eat cake. Just not me.
I’ve never cared for the stuff. Ice cream too. This is why, though, while I love parties, holidays, and general conviviality, birthday parties are something of a trial for me, as eventually someone will thrust a paper plate (my other least favorite thing in the world, apart from cars, and the foodstuffs here under discussion) into one’s hands, full of aerated sugars and the whimsical chemical spill we call “frosting,” expecting not only that we eat it all, and usually with a plastic fork, but that we sing about it. Gummy bears I could eat every day. Cookies I practically do. But I honestly wouldn’t mind if I never had a bite of ice cream (as distinct from gelato, which is of the gods) or cake again in my life. In fact, I can count on one finger the number of cakes I’ve had in my life that I’ve really enjoyed. Conveniently, it’s the finger on which I now wear my wedding ring.
Ordinarily, the metropolis is the place to come for the cultural sophistication and culinary expertise that is wanting in the provinces, but in this case, Amber and I traveled out from the center of all that’s good (Seattle) to our strip-malled version of “the sticks”—before one finds himself in the actual sticks, featuring bears that frequently roam in to play in the trash dumps—that is: Kirkland. For the blessedly uninitiated, Kirkland is home to dozens of tech start-ups, largely spun-off from defected and only sometimes disgruntled Microsoft employees, itself just a few miles up the road, and it is the antithesis of Seattle. The streets are designed for cars, the restaurants are all chains, the dwellings all single-family drywall boxes, and the place of business, without variant, is the business park.
Into one such park we two timidly wandered, driving around and around looking for Suite 110752, or some similar absurdity, and found, eventually, a half-fallen sign suggesting a baker might be on premises.
I suggested turning back, that they were probably closed, or terrible, but Amber said, gamely I think, “Look, all we have to do is go in, get a free piece of cake, and go home.” Sound reasoning, that. Plus, we had come all this way.
I winced at the interior—unpainted drywall and fluorescent lighting—and tried to ignore all the evidence suggesting the place was run by teenagers who had the idea to open up a cake shop that very morning.
Still, Mike, proprietor of Mike’s Amazing Cakes, is a creative genius of frosting. The books they pulled out for us showed not so much cakes as sculptures. The eye of man hath not seen, nor the mind of man conceived—as I think Nick Bottom the Weaver might have said on a clearer morning—such splendor as was on offer here.
We couldn’t afford any of them.
Or rather, we felt we shouldn’t afford any of them, however much we wanted to support this young Michelangelo. There was a more basic option, the hourly temp explained, lacking the fireworks and fondant: a simple butter-cream square to which we could tie our own ribbon for color-matching. It was explained to us while we munched our—was it 6th? 3rd?—cake sample, on paper plates of course, that Mike uses only organic ingredients, locally-sourced when he can get them.
We nodded our approval while we ate our very thin slices of not very impressive cake. Perhaps this Mike was more of a sculptor after all. The samples weren’t exactly sourced from Carrara marble, but they were just ordinary, Safeway-style, store bought, overly sweetened, slightly dry cake.
We left, shaking the dust of the suburbs off our shoes and then, curiously, ordered one. The choice seemed odd almost immediately after we’d placed the call, some weeks following our initial visit. We joked with each other afterwards, doing impressions of ourselves: “Mmm, this $750 cake is terrible; let’s get one.”
I can’t explain it. It’s like we were in a trance. But with all the other parts of the wedding to be planned, I just wanted something settled: one thing to cross off my mental list.
On the day of the wedding, my bride and I made the initial cutting—did we say a few words to open that proceeding? I don’t remember— and fed each other the first bites, as is our countrymen’s somewhat eccentric custom.
“Oh my god.”
“What did they put in this?”
“It’s amazing.”
“This is the best cake I’ve ever had.”
On and on it went. I don’t know what happened to damage Amazing Mike’s sense of consistency—let’s sell incredible cakes from the ugliest storefront imaginable! Let’s have pretty cakes taste like cardboard and plain ones taste like ecstasy!—but I’m glad it did.
The taste of food is a tough thing to convey in writing; it’s pretty firmly tucked up in the you-had-to-be-there school of experience, but it was rich and balanced, creamy and structured. The proportion of icing to cake material was exactly right in every bite, regardless of the angle of attack.
I was dumbfounded. Overjoyed. I was also, for the next two weeks, very very thankful that we’d overestimated the guest count and their attendant cake requirements by some 50 heads.