Cake Time.

I've blogged a lot about pie, but not about cake. The two desserts are pitted against each other, in my mind, much like Edward and Jacob in the "Twilight" movies. Each has its own particular allure. To continue the metaphor, I guess pie would be Jacob - less fancy, more comfort-food-ish, humble but sweet - and the cake would be Edward Cullen - lovely to look at, dressed-up, tasty but not at all redeeming. At least a fruit pie has some nutritional value to it, whereas cake is just sugar and white flour and butter and everything designed to rot your teeth and clog your arteries and make you feel a bit regretful for having consumed too much. I have lots more affection for pie, but can and will bust out a cake when necessary.

That's the thing about cake: there has to be an occasion. I'll make a pie just because some fruit or other is in season, but a cake in my household tends to commemorate an event, usually a birthday. The above cake was produced to mark the last day of a longtime co-worker and Bollywood fanatic named Kjerstin who is departing for a two-month trip to India, requiring her to quit working at the library. The scheduling stars aligned properly to allow baking, frosting and decorating of a cake to be delivered during her final shift, as they must. Pie is a one-shot deal, but cake involves steps. Bake the layers, let them cool. Make the frosting and spackle it on. Decorate (possibly involving the production of another batch of frosting), using my ridonkulous collection of pastry tips and other cake-decorating gizmos. I actually took a course on this once, and can turn out a supermarket-bakery-looking cake if that's what you want, but for this one, I decided to be a bit thematic.

The cake itself was a spice cake (get it? Spices! They come from India!), made with fresh grated ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, ground cloves and cardamom as well as half a stick of brown butter. The frosting is made with cream cheese and is a one-bowl deal, no cooking required. The concept here was a mehndi-design cake, like those henna tattoos Indian women and American hipsters apply to their hands and feet. I printed some patterns off of the internet, tinted my extra frosting in my best approximation of the color of henna, and had at it. You can probably tell I didn't really plan ahead. My mehndi-inspired designs were nowhere near as elaborate as the real thing, but hopefully the cake at least looked sort of Indian-ish. Although now that I look at it again, my paisleys look more like parameciums (paramecia?) with hairy pseudopods sticking off of them. Maybe if somebody I know gets a degree in biology, I can make a cake for that, too.