Let Me Eat Cake: A Celebration of Flour Sugar Butter Eggs Vanilla Baking Powder and a Pinch of Salt

Few creations are more associated with joy or more symbolic of the sweet life than cake. After all it is so much more than dessert. As a book about cake would demand this one is a multilayered amply frosted delicious concoction with a slice (or more) for everyone. Let Me Eat Cake is not a book about baking cake but about eating it. Author Leslie F. Miller embarks on a journey (not a journey cake although its in there) into the moist white underbelly of the cake world. She visits factories and local bakeries and wedding cake boutiques. She interviews famous chefs like Duff Goldman of Food Networks Ace of Cakes and less famous ones like Roland Winbeckler who sculpts life-size human figures out of hundreds of pounds of pound cake and buttercream frosting. She takes decorating classes shares recipes and samples the best cakes and the worst. The book is held together by the hero on a quest one that traces cake history and tradition. If we were to bake a cake to celebrate the birth of cake (cake is an Old Norse word first used around 1230) it is hard to say how many candles would go on top. Though the meaning of the word (originally lump of something) not to mention our expectations of its ingredients has changed over time we now celebrate cake as the coming together of flour sugar butter eggs vanilla baking powder and a pinch of salt. And what a celebration. Baking a cake is hard work but tasting it is pure pleasure. So put on some elastic-waist pants and grab a fork.