credit: berbercarpet
Is there anything you can put on a cake that would make it less appetizing?
-Casey
In the grand illusions that so many of you insist qualifies as Real Life there are a handful of questions that shake one to the core. This is one of those questions: Is there anything you can put on a cake that would make it less appetizing? Cake, like Coffee, is a platonic solid. A thing that is unto itself; neither composite nor fusible.
I know that some of you protest saying that cake contains knowable parts like flour, eggs, and chocolate. But, this is the the child like view of one who has not escaped the rusty chains of mundanity to see that synergistic complexities that create an ambrosial substance like cake. Case-in-point gross frosting does not deter one from the consumption of cake solids they slather.
It takes quite a bit of thought to truly create a foul topping for a cake. Take for example Salmon Paste as a topping that sounds bad, but all you have to do is make a savory lemon and onion cake and it suddenly isn’t bad at all. You could make a sour-cream and chives frosting, that sound horrible, however, if pair that with a potato cake suddenly it seems alright. If you made a potato flavored cake I think you could even put chili on it. So, you see what I mean. Seriously you are hard press to envision a topping that has not application to the proper cake.
However, I do believe it is possible to make an unappetizing cake. A truly inept cook can create a wretched cave-shadow version of Cake that leaves the viewer/taster worse for the experience. Take the tale of one Midwestgrrl:
Let’s see, what went wrong next? Oh yes, the cake. I did everything right for the cake until I folded the flour in. What looked like a beautifully smooth, fluffy batter was actually hiding huge pockets of unmixed flour, which showed up very unattractively in the finished cake. So, the finished consistency of the cake was “rubbery fried egg with flour pockets,” which, let’s face it, is not something you would want to try if you saw it on a menu.
You can also make an unappetizing looking cake:
Kitty Litter Cake
Yes, it looks like kitty litter, but it is actually Germans Spice Cake with vanilla pudding, green cookie crumbles, and Tootsie Rolls. Overall that cake probably tastes fine.
Certainly Casey it is possible to add something to cake that makes it bad, but you have to have either stoic determination or a very loose definition of cake.
