All Cakes Considered - Melissa Gray [2]
Steve Inskeep
Co-Host, Morning Edition
So, you want to bake a cake, HUH?
And You’ve Got Hungry Colleagues, Too? Two Birds, One Stone. Congratulations, You’ve Bought The Right Book.
Prepare To Become Very Popular At Work. Not For Your Brains. Not For Your Beauty. For Your Bundt Pans.
I know this to be true.
Every Monday, I bring in a cake for my colleagues at NPR, a.k.a., National Public Radio. Why Monday? Because no matter how much you love your job, Monday is the day you look forward to the least.
There’s something about having cake at work that makes everybody happy, even the dieters who proclaim that you’re doing this just to torture them. It’s a communal thing and a sensory thing. A behavioral psychologist might say that it’s using an object (sweet food) to stimulate pleasure receptors in the brain, thus building a powerful association in the subject’s mind between work and pleasure.
I hate being analyzed by the likes of B. F. Skinner, so I’ll just go Forrest Gumpian: “Momma says cake brings people together.”
And why not have cake on the job? The average American worker spends between eight and ten hours a day with a group of people to whom he or she is unrelated. It’s not your family, yet a great bulk of your energy and brainpower goes toward supporting this group. Being at work can either drain you or stimulate you. Though I just dissed B. F. Skinner, I’d rather be stimulated, thank you very much. This is why I work at NPR. Not only is the work rewarding, exciting, and fun, but the people I work with are smart, interesting, comical, and warm. The longer you work there, the more you become family. I’m Southern, so the thing my family does to show their love is fight and eat. Rather than fight, I bring in cake every Monday.
And, because I’m Southern, there’s always more to the story. I could have just brought store-bought cakes to the office every week, but where’s the fun in that? No, when this baking thing started, I had a need myself. For most of my adult life, I only had three good cake recipes, which sometimes turned out well. Two were family favorites, the other was a simple apple cake from Paula Deen that a drunken monkey couldn’t screw up. When I took those in to work, most nonbakers were impressed, but I knew my baking was nothing compared to what my mother, aunts, great-aunts, and grandmothers could do. Or did.
We’re down to just my mom and a few aunts now, and everybody’s on a diet, so the desserts at family gatherings aren’t as rich and thrilling and sinful as they used to be. No rum cakes. No sour cream pound cakes. Aunt Di’s bittersweet-chocolate frosted layer cake is sadly a thing of the past. And (sorry, Momma) Splenda does not taste as sweet as sugar.
My brother, irritated into action, gave me an expensive tube pan for Christmas one year. It’s the identical twin of the one he’d bought for himself. I took it as a not-so-subtle hint that the torch was being passed to a new generation. Except in our case, the torch was a cake pan.
He began a pursuit of all things pound cake, adding blueberries to the batter, mixing in flavored yogurt, trying different kinds of nuts. His wife and stepdaughter were impressed. So were his hunting buddies.
I wasn’t interested in doing pound cake, though. Instead, my odyssey began with an ambitious