cake porn

birthday picnic in southfork.  i'm making a really major wish here.

LARA: i look at images of cake online the way some people look at baby kitties.

yesterday,  a tough day, had me perusing the sites of some of my favorite bakeries, imagining the platonic birthday with the most perfectly round cake ever.

had me remembering cakes past,

planning future events

the kind of rumination that my therapist warns me about.  too much past and too much future

united in sweet, sweet cakery.

plus julie turley and i had to spend quite a bit of time chatting about what type of cake she should have for her birthday next week.

this is what a birthday cake should look like.

the pink dot
at ingrid's high school graduation time in 2010, i ordered a baskin & robbins ice cream cake covered in fondant polka-dots.  i love this cake, and would be pretty happy if i had it on my birthday every year.  it's a good cake for july, being composed of mostly ice cream, and the roundness of the polka-dot echoes the roundness of the cake and is so satisfyingly symmetrical, in a round ladylike way.  (and the polka-dots should be pink, always.)  so i order this cake, and i invite a few other graduates and parents for a little celebration. but something went awry with the polka-dots.  they were not perfect in any way, and looked like the owner's child had made and applied them. i was bitterly disappointed.

flash forward to my birthday, a month later, when i came home to find a perfect polka-dot cake in my fridge, put there by mary and dian, who had witnessed, and understood, my great disappointment in the first cake.

(christian thought it was funny, and didn't get that i was seriously upset by this sloppy cake covered in irregularly shaped dots.)

when i opened the box, my first thought was i'm not too old for birthday wishes to come true.


emily: bossing cake

emily with lula's 7th birthday rainbow sparkler cake

it is 2005 & i am as far from mental health as i have ever been in my life, excepting perhaps 2004.

the hapless mother of five, the ill-begotten doctoral candidate, with a newborn, a toddler on oxygen & what seems like a fortune in medications & averaging about three doctor's visits a week, not including visits to my therapist who is keeping me, barely, out of the psych ward.

in this state of body, mind, and finance, i am far from able to afford a bakery cake or to bake one for my own children.

lula's 7th birthday.  you can't tell from this photo that i am really & truly on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  balloons and emily's rainbow cake distract from the real picture.  hopefully lula didn't know this.

yet i feel to not provide a cake for the christenings & birthdays, at least, would be unspeakable, would remove my last shred of dignity and hope for the future, and would confirm my failure as a mother, a woman, a poet, and a grad student.

all of those things baked and frosted into tangible evidence of success.

sweet potato cake with white chocolate ganache--emily made this for moses' christening day.  this cake is one of the family's, and now the neighborhood's, favorites.

in swoops emily, the reigning cake boss of the asplund family, with some cake magic.  relieving me of the baking pressure on many more occasions than i am documenting here, and providing the levity & festivity to get me through those bootless cries, that tantivy of sorrowful birds darkening my view, eventually taking flight and revealing bluer skies.

JULIE:  My birthday is in nine days but I've been thinking about this year's cake for well over a month.  Over the years, I've ordered cakes from Something Sweet (who just lost their license due to health concerns), Sugar Sweet Sunshine (whose large portrait of Jackie Kennedy over the counter always inspires me), a now defunct bakery across from Tompkins Square Park, Ciao for Now, and for the last several years--Whole Foods:  The New York store really does offer beautiful store baked cakes, and vegan versions, too.

Sigh, I feel like I'm becoming so old that my cakes have to keep getting better.  I'm still undecided.  I've even wondered if I should do a strawberry shortcake or a pie.  But I would miss the buttercream.

A. accuses me of having a quasi romantic relationship with my cake every year.  And I guess I kind of do.    I also love cakes rendered two-dimensionally in art.  Did you know that renowned American artist Wayne Thiebaud has a cake fetish, too?:  

And Lara, here is the Black Hound Bakery cake you picked up for Eva's 18th birthday in NYC.  And do you remember how exciting it was when we found out they had a cake with bees!  Remember how awesome our waiter was when he ceremoniously served the cake to E?  It was his idea to blowtorch the candles upright, too.

eva:  18, only a month or two into college in nyc, with a utah themed birthday cake

we ate a cake similar to this exquisite mrs. backer's vintage-y decadent buttercream fantasia one summer in slc for julie turley's birthday at the pleasure palace.  j.t. has introduced me to all of the most memorable and delicious cakes and cupcakes.  i can't wait to see and hear about the cake she chooses for july 26th of this year.