I have cake problems.
When I don’t have cake in the house, that’s a problem. When I bake a random Tuesday night cake, that’s also a problem (who’s going to eat it?). Perhaps my biggest cake problem: my boyfriend and I have decided that loaf cakes, bundt cakes, and coffee cakes can go to hell—we dive straight into layer cakes lacquered with Swiss buttercream. Or Italian buttercream. Or French buttercream. (Never American buttercream—that would be too easy.)
We like a challenge. Instead of a classic red velvet cake, my boyfriend chooses to undertake Stella Parks’s version, which involves a cream cheese frosting that is at least a two-day process (you start by making vanilla pudding). I go slightly simpler, but when I made a chocolate cake from the Zingerman’s Bakehouse book for a friend’s birthday a few months ago, I tested it no less than three times, and when I was making the buttercream I took the temperature of the butter no less than thirty times. (Thank you, Thermapen.)
So you see that the cake is not the problem; it’s how seriously we take the cake that’s the problem. And in New York, there’s a store for people like us, aptly called New York Cake. It has row after row of sprinkles and offset spatulas and every shape of cake pan. We went with the intention of getting cardboard rounds for the bottoms of our cakes and big, bakery-style cardboard boxes to carry our cakes in. But of course we left with much more than that.
Honestly I forget most of what was in our bags; I mostly remember that it was so packed and heavy that I needed both arms to carry it. But I know that New York Cake was where I found my favorite new cake-making toy: a cheap, plastic cake turntable.
Dining and Cooking