Solace in a Plastic Clamshell:
A single slice of layer cake for Atrayu (me - I'm Atrayu in this scenario): And a few recipes in case you prefer to make your own because that is prob mostly why you're here (hat tip to you).
The fluorescent lights didn’t help how lowly I know I looked. They certainly didn’t help with how lowly I felt.
I pulled my beige, trench length, soft wool sweater - as close to a housecoat as a person might try to get away with in public - closer to my body, pulled the folded cowl collar up to my cheeks, pretending to be cold but really just trying for some glamor in the cruelly bright and public place I had found myself in all of a sudden. It was a quarter to 10pm. Closing time. No one gave two shits about me or how I was presenting in this Whole Foods bakery department. I only preened myself out of vanity and the immediate realization that I had not showered in four days nor really tended to my physical person at all for the greater part of a week. With my collar pulled close to my chin, pretending to have Old Hollywood style instead of Grocery Store Feet, I stood quietly dazed, squarely in front of a long refrigerated cabinet of cake slices. They were perched in their clamshells like little fat kids in tutus, ruffled and eager, all lit up and labeled with far too many ingredients, ready for me to choose who would be my companion, my champion, for the night.
It was early 2022 and I was still half-baked from the Covid era quarantine times - still barely finding my feet “out in the world” and desperately trying to help my family find theirs.
The details are unimportant, but come April of that year, when the horizon had just started feeling a bit clear of the last two year’s complications, my family found ourselves desperately trying to help one of our own who found themselves at the bottom of a pretty gnarly health crisis, and, thusly, in and out of hospitals in some of the worst ways you might imagine.
The night I found myself alone in a twilight twitch of a moment in Whole Foods, I had just endeavored the very first few days of it all, nothing solved but at least “settled” for the moment. For some reason, my instinct was to find a piece of cake to take home to eat alone before I scrubbed myself clean of the previous days.
I had sent my seventeen year old daughter to spend the week with my best friend (and her godmother) in San Francisco. We had some cancelled flight credits from the pandemic just sitting there to be used and getting her somewhere calm and restful felt important. I was heading home for the first time in a few days and, in her absence, I didn’t have the responsibility of being a grown-up or a mother to anyone. I didn’t have to pull my shit together to make a sensible meal. I could let myself be as reduced as I felt. I’d give my cats late night kibble. I’d give myself cake. Chocolate cake, if I could find it.
I’m not prone to a sweet tooth. But, something about the hospital grime, the exhaustion, and the education followed by immediate disillusionment of seeing the inside of mental health care in this country - it all made me want to rage eat cake and ice cream and wash it all down with a bottle of red wine, let the inflammation finally just have me entirely and wholly.
The lights were twitchy in this particular Whole Foods bakery department. Felt appropriate, like a nightmare - however cheap that feels as a metaphor. My eye was twitching right along with the fluorescents from lack of sleep so it felt like I was in the right place. I must’ve looked at the types of cake from afar for quite some time before even looking at the labels or inspecting the wares up close. I arrived there wanting chocolate but was pleased to find that there were so many options - many containing fruit that looked actually fresh. Though as the lights and my eye flickered, I realized that I was only half seeing the cake display. The other half my brain was finally having time to process and flip through the images and landscapes of the previous days, none of beautiful moments of healing or humanity, all cold and dehumanizing displays of health “care”, plastic walls, armed guards, bully nurses who can’t look anyone in the eye. I stared for a long time at a few blueberries buried in heavy whipping cream, all shoved against the plastic edge of its container while I tried to do the terrible math of how poorly we treat sick people in this country, how much all of this was going to literally cost us, how little any of the “care plan” we just organized might actually help. I was enfeebled by every single moment but this smush of blueberries held me tight, let me fixate just long enough to know that this was impossible work, trying to make sense of any of what we had just seen and experienced over the last few days.
“You know, the chocolate ones are always dry, but they have their charms.”
I don’t know how long she’d been there, but I was no longer alone.
Next to me stood a woman, hard to tell her age because honestly we both seemed like ageless sages standing in front of the heavenly glow of the cake display - like we had just journeyed to this Oracle to receive the next or final key on our quest to save the world and ourselves. We were, in our matching magic robes that had protected us thus far from our foes and made us impervious enough to the elements to not die, about to reach a next level of the game, receive our medallions, be knighted by some Goddess Priestess who had not yet revealed herself but who spoke to us from this glowing orb of day old cake slices.
“You know, I came for the chocolate but the blueberry situation caught my eye.”
We were bonded warriors. This was our language.
“Yeah, that’s the obvious move, though. What kind of night are you trying to have? Like, do you need to feel superior or something with a healthy option? Or do you just need to be swaddled in chocolate, even if it comes to you a little dry?”
I started to wonder, is she just trying to get the last piece of Blueberry Cake? It is obviously moist, basically drenched in whipped cream. Or can she smell that I haven’t bathed in days and is being a true hero, nodding me in the most benevolent of directions.
She reached into the cake case, I was impressed with her quick decision making. She’d obviously gotten to this level with her wits and charms, I thought. But then she started reaching for the dark horse of the whole case: fucking cheesecake.
“Oh!”, I exclaimed out loud in a more disgusted tone than I intended.
“Sike! Just kidding! I’m no monster.”
She grabbed the second to the last clamshell of chocolate cake and said, “You’d better grab that last one, it’s closing time.”
She then basically disappeared into thin air, Boss Leveled out of there so fast that I didn’t even get to say thank you, just saw the tattered tail of her cape as she scurried down the aisle of steam tables still full of shriveled samosas and ribs and neon macaroni and cheese.
I grabbed that last square of chocolate cake, quite literally like someone was going to take it from me and I practically ran home, excited about a thing, a life thing, a thing that was going to make me feel something else, something besides all the other things.
I took it home, ate it in front of my cats, fell asleep in my clothes and woke up to a new day.
I had made it, just like the Oracle promised.
I’ve been lucky in that people like to publish my recipes. This is particularly fortunate for me because I have written a lot of them.
If you love cake, as I do, here are some recipes that have been published of three of my best. (Links are embedded in the heading. Check ‘em out - lemme know if you make them!)
Chocolate Church Cake / The New York Times
Caramel Cake to Honor Edna Lewis / Food & Wine Magazine
Appalachian Apple Stack Cake / Bon Appetit Magazine
A Solid Recipe:
Here is a recipe I developed years ago that is a great base cake for, really, just about anything (a sharp eye will notice that this is the base layer for my Caramel Cake). I’m sharing it with you because if you fancy making a Blueberry Smush Cake™ from the episode above, this would be THE cake to make for that in my estimation. Brush it with some lemon syrup. Fill it with your best berries and cream. Frost it or not. I’d leave it plain or whip up a Swiss Meringue. Lots of options.
It is called St. Angie’s Yellow Cake because it is based on and inspired by the perfect cakes made by Angie Mosier, baker, food photographer and general hospitality Grand Spirit (she also happens to be one of my dearest, closest friends). There’s a whole chapter about her in my book, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, so I won’t go on here about it. You should read about her there if you haven’t yet. :)
St. Angie’s Yellow Cake
4c All-Purpose Flour
2T Baking Powder
2t Salt
8oz Butter, room temp
2.5c Sugar, regular-like, non-bleached if you can
4 Eggs
1c Whole Milk
½ c Buttermilk
1T Vanilla Paste
Preheat oven to 325 and prepare two 10” cake rounds with Baker’s Spray or butter and flour and a round piece of parchment on the bottom, making sure to also spray or grease/flour the top of the parchment before adding the batter.
Whisk dry ingredients together in one bowl. Set aside.
Whisk milks and vanilla paste together in a spouted measuring cup or something else easy to pour from. Set aside.
In a stand mixer bowl (or a large bowl, if using a hand mixer) cream butter and sugar together until good and fluffy with the paddle attachment.
Once your butter and sugar are well fluffed, begin adding your eggs one by one, scraping the bowl actively and giving each of them their time to shine.
When your butter and eggs and sugar are well incorporated and your sides are scraped and you have a cohesive situation, begin a series of alternating additions with your wet and dry. You’re going to work in thirds, starting with the dry and ending with wet. Scraping after each addition like a good and diligent soldier. You’ll want to stay with the paddle attachment (or your hand beaters if that’s what you’re using) for this step.
Upon the final addition of your wet ingredients, you’re going to want to scrape your bottoms and sides one final time and then kind of let it rip: turn your power up to medium high and really get everything worked together. Really show it who is boss here.
Pour batter into prepared pans (for nerds who like things to be exact like me: each pan gets roughly 880grams). I like to make sure my sides are clear of dribble (that really can effect the rise on your cakes, believe it or not) and then give the filled pans a couple of polite but meaningful thumps on your countertop, just to help it pass some air.
Place pans on baking sheet(s) and bake for 25-35 minutes, checking with a cake tester. She should come out pretty clean with just a little crumb on her face.
Let your layers cool in their pans on a cooling rack for at least 15 minutes before turning out. Cool completely before trying to frost or build a cake, obviously.
Tip: These layers freeze easily and keep well for awhile, especially when wrapped properly (parchment THEN plastic). To defrost, just let them come up overnight in the fridge and then let them sit out (still wrapped) on the counter for a few hours (unless you want to build your cake with chilled layers, which is OK by me).
That’s all for this week. There are a lot of new subscribers on here thanks to my new gig as Eat Columnist at The New York Times. Welcome! And thank you so much for being here. You’ll notice that I try to keep it pretty friendly on here and I post any day of the week that I can get myself sorted and where the spirit moves me, but I do make a commitment to post weekly.
I don’t paywall anything and do post a lot of original recipes here that have not been published before from my many years as a professional pastry chef. I also talk a lot about travel, places I love to eat and, my favorite, about the exceptional people in this wretched, beautiful, nothing-like-it industry whom I have had the great honor of knowing and working alongside. If that holds monetary value to you and you have the means to support a writer in this world, just know: your paid subscription means everything.
Thanks for being here, as always.
Stay warm out there!
Love, L
PS. Don’t forget that Substack is pretty fun when we can communicate. Leave comments, ask questions, start conversations. See ya there!
I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted to buy cake but your writing is so inviting that I now have rehearsed the act!
St. Angie she is...thank you for reminding me—with your always seductive language—of this creative powerful friend, and inspiring me to make a cake on this snowy day in Floyd!