What I Learned From Breaking Cakes
It was the first thing I was trying to do in a long day of cooking and baking. I was making the cake for a dinner party. As an avid amateur baker, I thought I’d start with the easiest task. I was making a chocolate cake. And everything was going perfectly according to plan until I couldn’t wait an extra ten minutes to let the cake cool. I was determined, for a reason still unknown to me, to get the cake out and the icing on while both were still warm, as per the instructions. And so I flipped the cake pan upside down, gave it a loud rap on the countertop, and right as Alice, my roommate, the person who had told me repeatedly to wait for it to cool more, walked out of her bedroom, I knew I had made a terrible mistake.
The cake pan hovered over the cooling rack and the color had drained out of my face. I had seen the debris of fallen pieces of cake, a perfect nine by thirteen rectangle utterly wrecked into lumpy pieces of warm, fluffy baked goodness, splatter across the counter.
I looked up at her. “It’s ruined."
“What did you do?”
“It’s completely ruined. I have to start over.”
My eyes were wide. Internally, I was more stunned than upset. Like taking a bullet to the leg, at first I wasn't sure what has happened. I didn't feel the pain – my brain can’t work that fast, it was like I just felt shocked by the surreal experience of hearing bang, seeing blood, and knowing something really bad is in the midst of going down. That was me and this destroyed cake. I was so confident that I wasn’t going to be shot in the leg. And then the blood had started to pour. And all I could think was – did that son of a bitch really just shoot me?
The panic started to set in.
“El, let me see,” Alice said, trying not to laugh. She had a poorly restrained grin on her face.
“I can’t look. No, you can’t see it. I – I completely ruined this cake.”
“Why didn’t you wait?” she said imploringly, now unable to contain her amusement.
“I don’t know! The recipe said – I don’t know! Stop laughing, this is serious!”
She cleared her throat and picked up a piece of the cake that had fallen out from underneath the still concealing, upside down pan. “I literally don’t see the problem. It tastes great.”
“Go away you’re not helping,” I said, half laughing, half trying not to cry. “And stop eating it!”
She stood there, unmoving from my side, and continued to eat pieces of fallen cake off the countertop. “Yes I am, and the longer we stand here not doing anything about this, the more of this cake I’m gonna eat. So let me see.”
I lifted the cake pan up. And we started to laugh. It was complete chaos. The entire bottom half of the perfectly baked cake was still stuck to the bottom of the pan, and the top half that had fallen out was clumped and folded over itself in a way that made it look more like day old meatloaf.
“It’s totally fine! We can just smush it back together.”
“That’s gonna look terrible!”
“No dude - it’s gonna be great.”
So in between fits of hysterical laughter, we reconstructed the mutilated cake into a square-ish shape, and poured icing all over the top of it. The cake plate hadn’t been large enough for the spillover that occurred, so the chocolate icing began to flood over the sides, pooling on the countertop below. We picked up pieces of cake that hadn’t fit in the reconstructed lump and dipped them in the countertop icing, treating them like bottomless chips and salsa at a tex-mex restaurant. It was 11:30 in the morning.
I was crying from laughing so hard, doubled over on the floor for moments of time as we reverted back to being fifteen years old again, attempting fruitlessly to bake box cakes in our parents’ kitchens, intentionally making them as ugly as we could. We leaned against counters, snacking on cake debris and laughing about how poorly that entire endeavor had gone. We joked about how to make it look worse. Alice teased me about wanting to make a whole new cake. I shrugged.
“What would I do without you?” I said, shaking my head at how quickly I had moved from gunshot wound to accidental masterpiece.
“You’d be swimming in cakes like a crazy person. I told you I could help.”
In the fifteen years we’ve been best friends, the moments I remember best about my relationship with Alice are the moments just like the morning of the Great Caketastrophe. The moments when I pushed her away and said, “leave me to handle this - you’re not helping.” And the moments she stayed fast where she was and said, “Yes I am - now LET me.”
I have always found it difficult to ask for help. I have always found a certain level of discomfort in being vulnerable in front of anyone, of being less than 100% okay. And yet, in all the passing years, I have learned that the one thing I crave more than anything else is the feeling of comfort in times of vulnerability, the feeling of someone showing up without reservations when I need help. And I’ve learned the worst truth of it all: you can’t get what you don’t ask for.
We don’t live in a world that supports that craving; we live in a world of filtered images and blurbs of happiness. We are constantly inundated with an ongoing stream of holiday newsletter-type impressions of each others’ lives. And when you’re watching strangers and friends alike jump from job promotion to marriage to yet another gold star achievement, it's easy to fall into the steadfast belief that who you are is never enough. And that the only way you’ll ever be enough is if you can do it all without breaking a sweat, just like the pictures and status updates. So for someone who innately finds being open and vulnerable challenging and is also prone to perfectionist tendencies, there’s almost no way to avoid that crushing pressure of keeping up the façade. And yet, it’s all I want. It’s all I ask for - just never out loud. “I just need help,” I whisper to empty rooms. “I just need a break. I just want someone to hear me.”
Ironically, in my pursuit to find a certain level of “enoughness” within myself, I’ve found that ripping away that shell of perfection is really the only way to get there. And lucky for me, when you live with someone, whether you intended to do so, eventually you have to break the veneer. Eventually that person is going to see you when it’s hard for you to breathe. Eventually that person is going to see you break a cake. I had been shot in the leg, but I was afraid of anyone seeing the blood, of knowing I was hurting. I needed someone to cut away the fabric and start applying pressure to the wound, but I was afraid to ask for it. Please just go away and let me deal with this when no one can see me cry, I meant when I told her I could handle it.
I’m not leaving, and we can address your self-defeating bullshit once you aren’t dead, she said when she stood there, unfazed and unmoved.
And after a moment of silently staring each other down, I lifted the cake pan. I said, Well if you're not going to leave, then fine. Please help me.
As I have started to put this theory into practice, I’ve found that people like to help. I’ve found that people like to give. I’ve found that, by putting cracks in my own walls, kindness and sincerity and the goodness of humanity has started to seep in. From broken cakes to broken hearts to everything else that breaks us apart and makes us feeling like not enough, I’ve found that the people I open up to fill me with that very sense of comfort and acceptance I craved. But I couldn’t have it without asking for it. I couldn’t feel better until I showed someone why I felt bad. I couldn’t be comforted without first lifting up the pan.
The cake, for those of you more interested in that than my life-affirming wisdom, was quite delicious. And I stuck a tiny flag in it that said “Come and Take It,” and I love that cake. I doubt the people who have consumed it understand how much that cake meant to me. But maybe I managed to smush some of that comfort and acceptance and enoughness into it, in between the pieces of delicious, reconstructed rubble. Maybe, in a metaphorical sense, it was love that held the pieces together – it was love that made the cake perfectly imperfect.
I’m kidding – it was brute force and a lot of icing.
