Cake Boss

I don't make art. I make cakes. Lots of cakes. Birthday cakes. Coffee cakes. Apple cakes. Pumpkin spice cakes. Walnut cakes. You name it, I make it. What I love about a cake is the whole-megillah element. Unlike a batch of cookies, one cannot sneak a slice without ruining it. Even better, cakes are novel. Nobody makes a cake from scratch anymore. I grew up baking with my mother, who learned from her grandfather, a professional baker in Warsaw and then Detroit.

What you see in the image above is a version of the birthday cake I make. Two layers of moist, dense chocolate that I have spiked with espresso, slathered with melt-your-teeth-off buttercream and topped with French dragée "oyster pearls." It is the object I made specifically for this exercise. That my dress -- an '80s number by Carmen Marc Valvo that once belonged to my echt-'80s aunt -- matches the spirit of the cake's décor is a neat aesthetic coincidence.

Here is what I did to the cake:

My worst nightmare on the cake-baking front was transformed into an art project. My cake now reminds me of the scene in "Superman" in which the road falls away as a result of an earthquake. A giant swath, jagged and definite, has been ripped out by my own hands.

I remain surprised by how unbothered I felt making a cake destined for destruction. The process of digging and scooping was also surprising in that it wasn't nearly as fun as I imagined it would be. I was too focused on appearances to accrue much visceral satisfaction from my bad behavior. I feel guilty about the waste I have engendered but that did not stop me.

Why did I slaughter the cake? In part because, as mentioned above, cakes are one of the few things I make. Next, this action is what one expects from children, not adults. Lastly, I did it because I could. Then I dumped it in the trash.
Rebecca Cascade