When is a cake not just a cake?

During my dark period, before I met my wife, I flirted with vegetarianism.  People that know me today are stupefied to hear this.  “You!?!?!  A vegetarian?!?!?”, they exclaim.  In truth, I fell into it as sort of a knee-jerk reaction following the results of blood work from an annual physical when I was twenty-seven.  At the time my cholesterol was a staggering 309.  I was like, “What the…..I’ll be dead by the time I’m forty!”. 

So out of desperation, I devised a solution.  I came up with the idea of eating a mostly low fat, mostly vegetarian diet.  And for the next three years (until I met my wife, who as you know became my own personal food-messiah), I was dialed in on miserly watching every gram of fat that went into my body.  I’d eat fish or chicken every so often, but most of what I put into my body consisted of plant matter and other flora.  Those who know me, know that when I get “into” something, I don’t do it half-assed.  Even a brief trend can become an all-consuming venture.  I was so obsessed with eliminating that fiendish, life-ending fat from my diet, that someone looking from the outside in might conclude that I was in the throws of some type of wacked-out eating disorder.  It was difficult.  It was miserable.  It was a completely banal way to live.  It’s no wonder that certain vegan-types are so easily angered and confrontational.  They (like me back then) miss out on all of the things that make life worth living, and their souls suffer for it.  What specifically brought me back from the brink?  Be patient, the answer is right around the corner.

As I said a few posts back, culinary salvation was in my future, and this three-year “monastic period” of my life came to a screeching halt upon hearing those wondrous words on my thirtieth birthday, “I made you a chocolate cake from scratch using my mom’s special recipe.  You gotta try this”.  As I look back, I’m certain that the Big Three-Oh was my tipping point.   Sure, The Wife (then, The Girlfriend) had graciously and lovingly stuck to my dietary conventions and made me grilled chicken and a dry baked potato as my birthday meal, as per my request.  But the cake…..god dammit, I didn’t ask for this!  She had to tempt me with a fucking cake? 

As she brought it out and placed it on the table, I desperately stared at it for a brief second.  I took in the slight imperfections in it’s symmetry that are commonplace when you make a cake from scratch.  But that comes with the territory.  You want your cake to look perfect, open a box of Duncan Fucking Hines, Jack.  It looked soooooo tempting.  Why was she doing this to me?  This was like offering a now-clean Nikki Sixx a huge eight-ball.  I found myself in an amazing quandary.  Did I stick to my kooky regimen and say, “Nah, I can’t.” and risk hurting my girlfriend’s feelings?  Did I want my birthday dinner to be the last time I every set foot in her apartment?  Would she give me the gate and kick me to the curb because I was a stubborn, insensitive, obsessive-compulsive psycho mess?  Was there a restraining order in my future?  I looked at that amazing little chocolate-iced creation in front of me, and quipped, “Yeah, I guess I could try a SMALL piece.”.   

I hadn’t even swallowed the first bite, and I was abundantly aware that it was all over for me and this futile pseudo-vegetarian adventure that I had attempted.  I knew that at that moment I had been brought back to the world of the living.  She hadn’t fed me the end result of just ANY chocolate cake recipe.  This was perhaps THE single greatest chocolate cake recipe of all time.  Right away, I noticed the moistness and the amazing mouth-feel of it all.  I was then hit with an incredibly intense chocolate taste.   Sure, there have indeed been other food experiences in my life that have had a similar immediate impact in shaping my culinary condition.  My first beer and wurst while studying abroad in Vienna; my first time trying sushi; my first sampling of hummus at Amer’s in Ann Arbor; the Kobe strip loin I had in Stratford, Ontario; the veal sweetbreads I tried in Burgundy.  All are awesome experiences and memories.   But none of them compare, or were as an impactful watershed moment as the birthday cake that I ate on my thirtieth birthday.  That evening, as I sat at my then-girlfriend’s kitchen table, in her tiny third-floor apartment on a sweltering August night, I could feel the pendulum swinging back toward me. Said pendulum was once again heading in the “right” direction, and I knew emphatically that the last three-odd years of my life had been a mistake.  A well-intentioned mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.   

Every year since, for the past twelve years, I request the exact same cake on my birthday.  Some years my wife makes it.  Some years my mother-in-law makes it.  But if I had to skip having this cake, I’d probably prefer to skip having a birthday.  Who says getting older has to be all bad?  And nothing helps cushion the blow of being on the wrong side of forty like chocolate cake.  Lesson learned.

Chew on that!
T.S.G.