The other day, Bradley, one of my favourite friends, brought up the linguistic phenomenon where grammatically correct sentences are sometimes formed by the repetition of just one word, provided the word can be both a noun and a verb. My favourite example is ‘Fish fish fish fish fish.’ (Noun noun verb verb noun), meaning ‘Those fish that are fished by other fish, also fish even other fish.’ It can be easier to understand if the plural of the noun is not the same as the singular, for example ‘Dogs dogs dog dog dogs’. There’s an even more complex one that has its own Wikipedia page, and which I brought to Bradley’s attention: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”. Get it? Doesn’t really matter if you don’t.
Now at the time that we were talking about this, I was looking for ideas for Bradley’s birthday cake. When I realised that ‘cake’ is both a noun and a verb (as in ‘caked in mud’), the lightbulb went off, and I set about devising a real life representation of the sentence ‘Cakes cakes cake cake cakes.’ This would of course entail a cake being caked by a second cake, and itself caking yet another cake. Simple!
I made a white cake following this recipe, and a batch of red velvet cupcakes following this one. I cut a cavity a cupcake wide and a half-cupcake tall out of the bottom layer of the white cake, and a cavity the size and shape of the cupcake top out of the top layer, inserted the cupcake inside the cavity of the bottom layer, and inverted the top layer to cover the cupcake. Thereby my cake was caking a cupcake.
I made some buttercream following the recipe on the aforelinked-to white cake recipe, and decorated the cake with a picture of a cake: The cake picture caking the cake.
The finished product:
When piping the picture of the cake, I started decorating it with that ‘vines and flowerbuds’ pattern that I’ve seen on cakes, to give it some sort of character. Then I liked doing that so much that I did the same thing to the whole cake. Unfortunately that sort of made the cake look like it was meant for a five year old girl. Bradley is not a five year old girl. He is a 24 year old male. Oh well. Pastels are for all ages, right?
Hello cupcake! How red you are! I sort of wish you were pink so you’d go with the pastel theme.
Ash The Photographer (who gets thanks for all the photos in this post) made us look a bit foolish by bending over a bit too much to be in this photo, but yaaaay happy cake baker and recipient.
Bradley was very intrigued by the concept of a cupcake being inside of a cake, and after asking me how I did it, started excitedly rattling off a list of ways it could conceivably be done. I eventually got him to shut up so I could explain how I did it. Here’s me poking between the layers to demonstrate their existence.
All in all it was a grand cake success, even though the theme of it went well over most people’s heads. The buttercream was way too lemony for my liking, but it did work well with the almondiness of the cake, which I found a bit too almondy 😛 The cake was super soft and lovely texturally, and weirdly enjoyable to slice through. This was my first time making red velvet, too, and I probably shouldn’t have done it because I only have liquid food colouring so I had to do all sorts of strange things to get it to do what I thought it had to. The cupcakes tasted a bit funny for it, but people still seemed to like them.
The end.
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