PrintWhy do most birthday cakes suck?
Why do most birthcake cakes suck?
I'd really like to know. While everybody else is singing "Happy Birthday," I'm thinking about how that first forkful of cake is going to be dry, virtually tasteless, and inedibly sweet, with grainy icing. Birthday cakes are often so bad I welcome the taste of the melted wax from the candles. I know I'm going to be seen as a killjoy and a curmudgeon, but I'm willing to take one for the team (of passionate eaters) here.
But on Saturday night, at a friend's 50th birthday, we had a killer chocolate mocha cake that could have been served as a dessert at a great New American restaurant like Craft or the Union Square Cafe. That the cake was great was no surprise to me. I told my friends to get the cake from Two Little Red Hens. I've had at least ten different kinds of cake from TLRH, everything from yellow to white to chocolate cake, with every kind of frosting and filling imaginable, and I've never been disappointed.
There are a few other neighborhood bakeries that make very good birthday cakes: Soutine, and Amy's Bread.
I used to love Cupcake Cafe cakes, and while they are indeed beautiful, I have found that over the years they have gotten so buttery that's all they taste of. The Cupcake Cafe cakes prove that in fact food can suffer from butter overload, and I didn't think that was possible.
So maybe birthday cakes don't have to suck. We just have such low expectations for them that we accept bad birthday cakes as a given, and we convince ourselves that they're not all that bad (my very polite wife's solution).
As a result we suffer in silence. Not any more. Join me in my "Birthday cakes don't have to suck" crusade.
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4 Comments:
As a poor person, I usually offer to make birthday cakes for friends. Everyone wins--I don't have to run all over town searching for a meaningful gift, and the friend gets a homemade cake. Chocolate with 7-minute icing or yellow cake with chocolate buttercream are always big hits, but a dense Queen of Sheba torte is actually easier to make, and it serves hundereds of people because it's so rich. But really, who has time to make a cake?
I grew up in the midwest, which has no Carvel. Now we live about a block away from a Carvel, and while I'm underwhelmed with their ice cream, I'm curious about this Fudgie the Whale cake. Is it any good if you're not a little kid or an adult with Carvel nostalgia?
SaraBir at 1:31PM on 08/15/06
I don't know if I'm prepared to say that all birthday cakes suck, but without a doubt most of the layer cakes you can buy in NYC do. Some of them may LOOK great but they just do not deliver. The cake itself is either dry and crumbly or gummy; the frosting is all too often either a grainy sugary mess or a wad of wax that sticks to the roof of your mouth until your next birthday.
I agree completely about Two Little Red Hens; I served ten of their cakes at my wedding and people were very happy. Before we bought them, my wife and I ran all over New York sampling layer cakes (we didn't even get into the "wedding cake" scam) and we were depressed and disappointed over and over until we got to the Little Red Hens. Why do people support bakeries that turn out sub-par cakes? I can only speculate that because cake is now a once-or-twice-a-year occasion, people don't eat it often enough to be discerning. It's like the roast turkey at Thanksgiving--sure, everybody knows it's dry as sandpaper, but most of them have never know it any other way, and they can put up with it once a year.
The red velvet cake at Cakeman Raven in Fort Greene is a lovely thing but the employees there are, in my experience, flakey. I wouldn't want to rely on them if I absolutely needed a cake for a special occasion--which a birthday, by definition, is.
pete at 9:34AM on 08/17/06
I agree with Ed. Most birthday cakes are tasteless cavity traps. I like the red velvet cupcakes from Amy's bakery. I haven't tried the cake version, but I'm sure it has to be the same recipe. For the Red Velvet cupcake she uses a whip cream for the top (not icing), and her cupcake is moist. For me, it's all about moist cake and a not too sweet frosting.
Decca at 2:16PM on 12/07/07
"Moist cake and a not too sweet frosting." I like that as a birthday cake mantra. Maybe we should add "smooth, not grainy" to the frosting description.
Ed Levine at 2:34PM on 12/07/07