Look, we’d all like to be the cake Alex Rodriguez gave Jennifer Lopez on her fiftieth birthday last week — a gargantuan, ten-tiered, black-and-gold tower protected in flowers and sparklers that stated “Jennifer” on the pinnacle and changed into carried into her extravagant Miami celebration by way of 4 men in fits. We’d even settle for being the cake Jennifer Lopez gave Alex Rodriguez for his forty-fourth birthday multiple days later — a four-tiered, Yankees-themed cake draped in an icing “Rodriguez” jersey, with “Alex” spelled out in crystals at the pinnacle.
But from time to time, we falter. Sometimes, we actually don’t have the intellectual or emotional bandwidth available to head above and past. Sometimes, we’re the cake Jennifer Lopez gave Alex Rodriguez on air whilst he changed into web hosting Sunday Night Baseball for the duration of a Yankees–Red Sox sport: a despondent-searching, grocery-save sheet cake that stated “Happy Birthday” in off-focused green icing.
“This is for the ESPN family because we’ve already given you one,” Lopez tells Rodriguez when his daughters carry inside the cake, that seems like a sigh sounds.
“The complete summertime has been one big cake,” Rodriguez says to his co-people, a sentence which additionally aptly describes my perfect summer.
To be clear, there may be nothing incorrect with a grocery-shop sheet cake, simply as there’s nothing wrong with us while we don’t have the electricity to be a human ten-tiered birthday cake. Grocery-store sheet cakes are fabricated from icing softer than silk, cake lighter than clouds, and even though you can sense your tooth screaming as they dissolve in the dangerously high concentrations of excessive-fructose corn syrup when you devour it, you are glad.
But this cake looks disenchanted in itself. It is aware that it may have made a higher display; all it wanted to be turned into some greater decorations, plant life perhaps, or balloons, or even simply a larger, much less inexperienced font. It could have been greater on some other day, but simply not that day. That day, all it may say changed into “Happy Birthday” on one wilting tier. That’s ok. We all fall short once in a while. And you know what? People nonetheless enjoyed it.
There will be descriptions of taste flavorings that sound so delectable that when you taste it, you still may not believe how horrible it tastes, or even vice versa. Try all that you can until you find your favorite. Take water or seltzer to clear your palette after each tasting so that your next taste of a different flavor will not have the lingering taste of the previous confection. Finding your favorite will be almost instantaneous sometimes, and other times, it is a long expedition into the cake world of taste and textures of cake and frosting.
When you find the one that you believe you want. Wait a day or two and go back and taste it again. If you have your meal planned out already and it is something that you can marginally duplicate, do that, eat it and then go to the baker and try the cake again. Or if you liked it on the spot, see if you can take a slice or two home to try it again, with “the” meal or something similar, so you can see if it will work. If it doesn’t work, you are on your search again, unless you want to change something in your meal. Or have a dessert reception.
Just like there are wedding dress trends, there are also wedding cake trends. When I got married, I knew that I wanted my cake to be on three different pedestals arranged askew, not in a row or on top of each other; I was bucking the 2005 wedding cake trend. Back then, most of the cakes looked like round hats stacked on top of each other, complete with the bow. The color was starting to get adventurous back then.
Also, I knew after tasting several cakes randomly that I wanted double chocolate/carob and my friend’s specialty butterscotch rum in the middle. I also love fondant, so I knew that I wanted that as my frosting. However, I didn’t buck traditional altogether since my cakes were white with purple ribbon at the bottom of each layer with flowers to compliment my dress. Because of my milk allergy, I knew that the top had to be a white cake and hopefully something that would keep for a year, or so I thought.
