Last weekend, friends from Wisconsin came to visit. They arrived late Friday night and were headed further south than us to explore prettier parts of Georgia on Sunday morning. A short visit, but we spent a long Saturday outside of time discovering anew why we enjoyed one another’s company. We woke Saturday morning in unforced stages. There was no itinerary. We drank coffee on the back patio under loblolly pines. The crows kept watch while A. and K. shared tales of “free to roam” hikes taken in Scotland and caught us up on Wisconsin news. Conversation spanned books, food, social media, attention, photography, music, meditation. Naps were taken without excuse.I picked a favorite dinner spot and the evening threw laughter out toward star shine. Time had the quality of presence. Great visit.
What I want to talk about right now though, is cake. This particular restaurant has a very plain almond cake on its regular menu that I order every time I eat here. It comes out a modest, pale brown wedge snuggled on the plate between smudged arcs of espresso cream and gooey caramel flecked with crunchy salt. The cake is a single layer, unfrosted and barely sweet, but deeply fragrant with a creamy, nearly-damp crumb. It gestures towards quintessence for me and was the perfect way to punctuate a day that was ultimately about celebration and connection.
For my past work as a wedding cake designer and for my current work with Thirteen Cakes, a project which pushes more into the realm of story, ritual, and ideas, I concoct some pretty elaborate cakes. These cakes are stacked high with layers of meaning. In fact, a point of creative interest for me lay in testing what the cakes can hold and when the weight of story tips them past capacity like a caramel pot heated to overflow. I understand that cakes can bear the weight they can because they have always been at the center of ritual and ceremony.
I’m working on a speculative piece about the circumstances and uses of early cakes. The essay is in first rough stages but what I can say is this. In those days, long before British Bake-Offs and Pinterest, the context (ritual) and use (connection) of cake was what distinguished it. It’s shape (like the full moon) and it’s sweetness (an infrequent but meaningful attribute) marked it as special. Heightened the occasion.
So there is a not-too-sweet simplicity of a single layer cake thoughtfully made that gestures back for me, to why cake is a thing in the first place. No matter how elaborately I build my own cake houses, they must include a doorway that leads back to this archetypal understanding, or I have not served the cake or the people eating it.
The almond cake in question has a near-timeless quality. It could have been drizzled with honey or studded with dried currents or soaked in mead or palm wine (I like mine with a tawny port). This one, I think, must gain some of its dampness and flavor from a judicial brush with an almond simple syrup.
For a good while, I belonged to the school of thought that believes if you make the cake right in the first place, it won’t need a syrup soak. The “soak” has been normalized as a kind of “insider” tip framed as essential for ensuring cake moisture. I groan every time I see self-crowned baker influencers make overly sweet, dry-ass cakes soggy-wet with sugar syrup. But as I look for ways to add those layers of meaning to my own cakes’ flavor stories, my attitude has shifted. As long as their use is measured and they are not overly sweet, syrups and soaks have huge creative potential for adding flavor and meaning to a cake story.
I’m in a slow process of conceiving a grief cake for myself. I guess it will be the first of the Thirteen. This cake will reflect some truth about the ways my grief has shape-shifted and shaped my experience of this Georgia spring. More to come on that process. For now, I’ll say that whatever kind of cake I eventually land on, whatever it ends up looking like, it will hold my story as I process it and reflect that story back to me in a way that I perceive not only pain and absence but also beauty and sweetness. It will be the centerpiece of personally meaningful ritual that marks the importance of sitting with difficult feelings and intentionally metabolizing them toward healing. Toward integration. Toward remembered wholeness. And lastly for now, I know at least this: it will be judiciously and reverently infused with pink magnolia syrup.
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What is spring welling up in you? Who or what are you celegrieving now?
xx
❤️