Having Your Cake

Cake? Cake?! Did someone say, "Cake"??!!

I love cake. My Twitter friend MuchAdo1 has even written about my special affection for cake in her blog.

Of course, anybody who knows me knows I love sweets in general, but I reserve a special place in my heart and in my stomach for cake. There is something about its velvety goodness that not only tempts the taste buds, but settles the stomach. Let's face it: the best part of a wedding is the cake. Even the word "wedding" looks and sounds like "cake" to me. Similarly, birthday presents are great, but the best part of a birthday is - you guessed it - cake. Like "wedding," "birthday" equals "cake" in my world.

The texture of a cake has to be just right. Not too dry, and not too moist. There must be a certain weight to the structure of the cake so it has some substance. Yet there must be a lightness that allows me to forget about chewing and simply let the spongy, fluffy goodness melt in my mouth. This is one reason I detest having foreign matter in my cake. It makes it very difficult for cake to melt smoothly in my mouth when obstacles like nuts, fruit, or coconut stand in the way. They are intrusive interlopers that have no place in a perfect cake.

The requirements that I have of my cake are exacting because they are what make cake the perfect delivery vehicle for frosting. The cake and the frosting combine to create a sugary bliss of taste and texture that can be achieved by no other dessert. The more frosting, the better, as far as I'm concerned. Layer it on thick! As delicious as cake is by itself, it attains its highest calling as a method of transporting frosting from the fork to the mouth.

And, of course, the frosting has to be the right kind. None of that wimpy stuff that resembles Cool Whip for me. And fondant? Bleah! Don't even come near me with it! Yet while a good, heavy ganache or torte frosting is nice once in a while, give me an old-fashioned buttercream frosting or the lovely sweetness Duncan Hines puts in a can. And for the love of all that's edible, don't put any of the aforementioned foreign matter in my frosting, either! A nice, smooth frosting piled thickly on a great cake is melt-in-your-mouth heaven. What else could I possibly need?

Naturally, the frosting between layers of cake should be at least as thick as the frosting on top. Thin, skimpy crumb coats are for wusses! I also find it an unfortunate trend that many commercial bakeries are going to a fruit filling between layers instead of the substance God intended – MORE FROSTING! Fruit filling between layers qualifies as more of that foreign matter I mentioned previously. It stabs a sharp dagger of intense fruitiness between the ribs of the otherwise-smoothly flavored cake that delivers a fatal blow to the whole cake-consuming experience. If I am unfortunate enough to be served such a piece of cake, I will scrape out the offending fruit filling before dining on the deserving part of the cake.

But let us rid our minds of such horrors. I prefer to think instead upon a smooth, velvety cake with piles of sweet buttercream frosting. A great cake built to my high standards is heaven on a plate and ecstasy in your mouth. I am sure to have lots of it at the next wedding or birthday party I attend. If you see me there, be sure to cut me a corner piece with lots of frosting on it. Meanwhile, I have some baking to do.

Being a Speed Limit

Today is my birthday, and for the first time in five years, I'm a speed limit. For the last time until I hit 55 or 70, I am now one of the most common speed limits on American roads - 45. How cool is that?

Now if I were celebrating any other birthday, it wouldn't be as cool. After all, I don't know that there's anything particularly special about turning an age that just happens to be divisible by the number 5. Said birthdays are even less cool when they're not one of those mile markers like 25 or 75 that represent entire quarter centuries lived. By those standards, 45 is buried in ignominy.

It's different when you're turning an age that is divisible by 10. When your age ends in a zero, you've just finished living a(nother) decade of life and there's a whole new decade in front of you. The first one of these - when you turn 10 - is really neat because now you can count your age using double digits. The decades that follow mark transitions into different parts of life. Not only that, but it helps the increasingly aged mind that the math becomes much easier at a 10-year point.

There's something about the decade that makes those birthdays extra cool, too. We even talk about time in terms of decades. It's easy to refer to the sixties, seventies, eighties, or whatever. But who in the world talks about time in five-year increments? Think about it: while people may reminisce about the seventies, for instance, they just don't wax rhapsodic about the specific period of the late seventies. Of course, that may have more to do with the lame clothes and disco music of the time, but still . . . We just don't talk about fives the way we do tens. This is just another reason that some may be tempted to leave 45 in the dust of passing time.

But there are other cool things about being 45. For one thing, it's halfway to 90. I've got another 45 years before I'm really old. But, by far, the coolest thing about being 45 is that I'm now a speed limit. My age is posted on rectangular white signs for the whole world to see. Granted, said signs don't say "Julayne is 45," they simply say, "Speed Limit 45." But every time I pass one from now on, I'll know it means me.