Kyle Minor

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February 11, 2005

WTF is Cake Club?

I have long been interested in cooking in general... especially baking sweets like cookies. My favorite annual ritual is making Christmas cut-out cookies, especially since I've found the best recipe ever for them. What can I say? Some of us homos get the flower-arranging thing, some get the Liza thing, and some get the Circuit Party and over-developed chest thing. I got cookies.

I was visiting our pal Nank once, and she had a copy of The Cake Mix Doctor. It was full of recipes for taking plain old cakes and mixing in extra ingredients and making them less mix-like. It was also full of all sorts of great tidbits about baking, the history of cake mixes, stuff about what kinds of pans are best and why only people who wish to slowly poison their friends should ever use canned frosting.

This book was like an epiphany: I found myself compelled to bake! At the same time, my most excellent pal Jenny was determined to try a cake recipe she found. It was for something called Black Cake, and it was a laborious, months-long process involving chopping endless fruits and letting them steep in strong alcohol. Jenny invited me to participate in this grand experiement, and Cake Club was born!

In the end, the Black Cake was a horrifying, disaterous, inedible mess (Burnt Sugar Essence? I mean, we should have seen it coming). It was essentially a fruit cake, which everyone knows is the second-best thing to poison your friends with next to canned frosting.

As for Jenny and myself, I can only claim that we were blinded by art! The description of this cake in the book she had made it sound like biblical Manna that had been steeped in a vanilla bean burre blanc sauce, wrapped in a lucious flaky crust, baked at 325º for an hour, and served with sweetened creme fraiche. Frankly, though, it tasted like crap.

But we remained undaunted! We went on to meet and bake many subsequent cakes, some of which were also failures. However, the successful ones were so great that we keep plugging on, waistlines be damned.

Jenny has several posts about Cake Club on her blog, which she's been doing for a lot longer than I have. At some point, I will have to share a look at my custom-made Cake Club Neighborhoodie. It is my favorite article of clothing, and don't I feel so very "Mission" when I wear it.

Finally, we realize there are lots of other Cake Clubs, like this one, this one, and even this one. I doubt any of these clubs would have us, as our cakes are generally pretty ugly. Besides, we talk about Buffy, and something tells me those other CC folks wouldn't know Dawn from Dawn.

Posted by kyle at February 11, 2005 4:36 PM

Comments

Posted by: Nicole at February 11, 2005 9:07 PM

Posted by: Kari (Parsons) Gaudet at March 17, 2006 6:19 AM