I baked a cake for my father’s birthday last week. He loves Devil’s Food cake with dark chocolate frosting, but this year I decided to make things a little more interesting. I added all sorts of things into the cake (coffee grounds, espresso, cinnamon, motor oil), and then tried adding three shots of espresso to the frosting before whipping it into a silky consistency. The problem with altering the frosting as I did was that it lost the ability to hold the top and bottom layers of the cake together, and also had some difficulty staying on the sides of the cake. The result was that I had to use uncooked spaghetti noodles to fasten the layers together, and the whole cake had the appearance of a melting pile of dung.
This wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the fact that I’d volunteered to bring the cake to our celebratory dinner at Morton’s of Chicago. I arrived ten minutes early to avoid ruining the surprise of the cake for my father, and shamefully handed my sagging concoction to the hostess. Because of the consistency of the frosting, I was unable to cover the cake in any way, so my work of art was fully visible to everyone around. Which would have been fine had I been carrying a beautiful confection or had I been seven, neither of which were the case.
Lest you think I am exaggerating in the least, consider the hostess’ response when I arrived with the cake. “Oh!” she exclaimed sweetly. “That is so adorable! What sort of frosting is that?” When I explained that it was chocolate espresso frosting, she pointed at the frosting pooled around the base of the cake and asked, “Is that why it is, um, like that?”
The true icing on the cake (zing!) came when dinner ended. We celebrate my father’s birthday at Morton’s every single year, and every single year, they send a complimentary dessert with a candle to the table in recognition. No song, no fanfare, no crowd – just a simple acknowledgment. But as a nice, personal touch this year (and probably to give a laugh to the staff), an entire herd of servers and hostesses carried my homemade cake to the table and burst into a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday.
My father especially enjoyed finding the noodles that had accidentally broken off in the cake. I may never bake again.