Cake

    Do you love a special cake?  Do you remember a special cake from your childhood?  My mom would make a cake over a pie any day.  She thought pies were too much trouble for what you got out of them.  But cake.  That was different.  On our birthdays the smell of our birthday cakes baking often was what woke us in the morning.   My brother's favorite was Boston Cream Pie (cake) and I made my very first one this Easter.  I've never eaten nor baked one before. And I'm a baker.
    Cakes are what we  contribute to a funeral or carry with us when we visit a sick friend.  Marge always offers her standard 'Funeral Cake,' a light cake filled with blueberries.  At funeral lunches I go for a piece of cake for dessert because there's nothing like a sheet cake made in someone's kitchen.
    We have our favorites, right?  I prefer chocolate/chocolate (cake/frosting), but I can remember sometimes craving yellow cake with chocolate frosting.  Never, never, never, ever, ever, ever chocolate cake with white frosting.  Poor PH.  His mother frosted their brownies with white frosting and I won't do it for him.  I tell him it's a sacrilege.   Actually, when we were kids my mom didn't frost our cupcakes because we kids didn't like the frosting much.  It was usually scraped off into the wastebasket so she just didn't bother.

   
   Julia Child said " a party without a cake is just a meeting" and she was right.  A cake carried to the table never fails to bring sighs of appreciation.  Maybe because we don't take the time to make a frosted layer cake anymore.  Maybe baking at home just isn't done anymore.
    There was the era of the bundt cake, the simple fluted hole in the middle dense cake sliced along those fluted lines.  I use the bundt pan to make a killer cream cheese pound cake that will make you cry.  Let's not forget cheesecake!  Plain cheesecake with a fruit topping?  Groan. And gingerbread cake. What would fall be without that?  Coffeecake, warm from the oven for special breakfasts or when a friend is expected to drop by. When my son was about 4 years old a friend come by and we sat and talked over pieces of a cinnamon coffee cake.  He sat there politely and finally got down from his chair and told my friend, "if you're not going to eat that I will!" and he took her piece and did eat it. Who would stop him?
    Cake is the centerpiece of a celebration. In my other life I made wedding cakes.  I sold decorated cakes. Our pictures are taken next to our cakes verifying the celebration they stand for.
    And sometimes, as in the picture above, we just have to make a cake to celebrate a peach.