Chocolate Cake: A Personal History
How “know thyself” starts with layered baked goods
As a child, I wanted the same thing for every birthday: chocolate cake. Photos of my birthdays show me grinning with chocolate frosting smeared liberally over an ecstatic face. Family stories, the slightly cutting ones, involve my being such an enthusiastic eater of chocolate that I needed to be seated on a plastic tarp, garbed in a Glad bag, and toted off to the bath to extract chocolate from my ears. You know how those stories go- they’re absolutely meant to be cruel, in the way that families can be, exposing your childhood loves to the scrutiny of your adult life.
When do we learn to be ashamed of our passions? If mine was for chocolate cake, I can see when it happened. At some point, I stopped asking for my chocolate cake, settling for the staid and stately yellow cake and vanilla icing that my brother favored. Here’s the truth: I hate yellow cake and vanilla icing. Everyone else liked it. At what age do we learn to sacrifice our wants to please others? I can pin it to that cake: tired of family mockery at 4, I asked for a different cake for my 5th birthday. There we are. Birthday after birthday of yellow cake with vanilla icing until my well-meaning family thought it was my favorite. Birthday after birthday of my name piped across white buttercream icing, the years counted out on cakes that I didn’t actually want. Birthday after birthday of choking down a cake that everyone else liked, and I did not.
Vanilla is the smell of self-sacrifice.
Everyone reaches a breaking point. It took 29 years to remember what I wanted: a chocolate cake. How did this baking breakthrough happen? My family, bless their hearts, had informed my (now ex) husband, before we married, that he was to procure this yellow and vanilla tower of self-sacrifice at each birthday. Dutifully, he did, birthday after birthday of my name and year again piped out across buttercream that I did not want. Dutifully, he laughed, as every year, my family retold him the story of the chocolate smeared, the plastic tarp, the Glad bag.
I grew tired of duty and vanilla cake.
In my 33rd year, I asked for a divorce. I did this thing, the woman who continued to eat a cake she didn’t want on her own birthday.
Once that family hurdle has been leapt over, of what difficulty is the petty demand of a chocolate cake? You’d think that would be easy.
Jesus wept, it was not.
I made it through my 34th birthday with the same damned cake. Yellow. Vanilla. I promised myself this wouldn’t happen the next year. Surely, 35 would be different.
The 35th year was a cake shared with my brother, as, of course, we shared a favorite cake: yellow and vanilla. The smell of self-sacrifice does, at some point, get a little suffocating.
Fork in my cake, staring across the table at my brother laughing himself to tears over that plastic tarp, at my father bringing up the subject of my failed marriage, at my mother endeavoring to ensure I didn’t rock the boat by snapping, I grasped the hand of my boyfriend (now husband) and apologized for the cake, for my failed prior marriage, for the small cruelties of family.
On my 35th birthday, that man baked the most decadent chocolate cake, all from scratch. It had four layers, so tall that it didn’t fit in the refrigerator, so huge that we ate (from frozen, we’re not heathens) chocolate cake for weeks, sharing a plate, staring into each other’s eyes like besotted chocolate lovers.
On my 36th birthday, we had been married three months, and I had three delicious layers of chocolate cake; he even baked cupcakes for my niece and nephews (rarely allowed cake because, evidently, sugar is the devil).
On my 37th birthday, I was in mourning for my mother who had passed away four months before; we ate chocolate cake, looking at those baby photos of me eating her homemade chocolate cake, before my mother decided the store bought cakes were prettier than hers and grew ashamed of the chocolate mess. We remembered how, whenever I was sad, my mother would slip away to Wegman’s to bring me a tiny Ultimate Chocolate Cake.
Chocolate is the smell of love.
Cakes are the language of family.
Our wedding cake, by the way, was strawberry. I will not tell you what strawberry is the smell of.
For an audio version of this story, visit my podcast, OstraCandice.
