Cake As Plumage

(Please click on the title for a reading aloud by the author.)

The hiking group I’m part of recently had it’s 500^th gathering and to celebrate, it was a pot luck dinner. Avid hikers it turns out, are also avid eaters and partiers. Although as of late I haven’t done much hiking with the group I decided to go. It’s a wonderful bunch of people and you don’t turn 500 every day. That the list of attendees was looking like 2:1 women to men was a plus. I decided to bring a dessert.

After the horrible crash and burn of a very significant relationship a few years ago I have taken my licks and learned a few things – about the world and myself. They have been hard lessons. But I’ve come back to life and have been dating with mixed to poor results. The mate selection thing has always been a mystery, but I’ve been getting out there and asking women I find attractive for dates. A number have said yes, but all in all it hasn’t worked. So I’m now giving Darwin’s assertion, “male plumage, female choice,” a try. I’m putting what little is left of my feathers on display and if it’s like the movies a captivating woman will see me from across the room, make her intentions quite clear, we’ll fall in complete and everlasting love, live in a well lit upscale home with designer furniture have great jobs and drive Porsches. And the music will always be in the key of C with a perky upbeat beat.

Alas, life is not the movies, so I called my sister Vic. She might have some pointers, and I knew we’d have some laughs and that always helps. “I’m just a guy going to this event to enjoy myself. They’re enjoyable people. But it’s also 2:1…” I gave her the story.

“What are you going to wear?” She asked.

“Oh, jeans and my white button down shirt. I’ll vacuum the dust off my shoes.”

“Um… no. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. Something soft… something with drape. Something that says, “touch me.””

“Ok, I can do soft,” I said, “but I can’t do drape.” So I decided to wear my best sweater. My wardrobe, to be frank, is dull. Anything beyond a plaid flannel shirt and I start feeling like Elton John. So the sweater is lamb’s wool and a classy piece of merchandise and I feel comfortable in it. Even though it’s grey it would have to do.

“What are you going to bring for the pot luck?”

“A dessert. I thought I’d bake a pie.”

Vic reminded me of the story about friends Sally and Jonathan in New Hampshire. It is a love story and it starts with chocolate. And now twenty years later it continues very nicely with chocolate. “C’mon,” she said, “we’re talkin’ plumage. It has to be chocolate and for a dinner dessert it really ought to be cake.” I knew she was right. “For added effect,” she offered, “you might rub some chocolate behind your ears.”

“Oh very funny, Vic. I’ll leave the pheromones to ol’ Dr. Cutler and the back pages of car magazines if you don’t mind.”

While I like to bake, pies are my forte. The last time I did anything with chocolate was to dip some strawberries in it, which came out well, and the last time I made a cake was a thousand years ago, a carrot cake, and it came out ok. But a chocolate cake? One with plumage factor? I’ve learned when I’m out of my league to realize it quickly and draw upon my resources. Vic and I had a few more yuks, I’d try to not trip over things and otherwise not screw up like Woody Allen and so on. Then I called Lewis.

If there’s anyone on the planet who knows how to bake a chocolate cake it’s my friend and neighbor Lewis, a.k.a. Uncle Lewi.

“Uncle Lewi?”

“Yes…” True to his North Carolina roots.

“Would you teach me how to bake a cake?” Knowing “cake” in the world of Lewis can be something very complex I quickly added, “simple would be good.”

“Sure, G.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and we arrived at making a chocolate cake with chocolate ganache butter cream frosting. I went over to his place to get a copy of the recipe. It was two pages long. But the ingredients – for the cake and frosting - had lots of all the right stuff… one pound baker’s chocolate, three sticks of butter, three cups of sugar, two cups of heavy cream, three eggs. And a few other minor ingredients. Like flour.

“Listen. You get the ingredients together and come over here Sunday morning and I’ll show you how to do it. It’s simple.” Said Lewis. Oh yeah, simple.

But this was a very generous offer on Lewis’ part and I took him up on it. His kitchen is better equipped than mine, and the tutelage of a master doesn’t come along every day. I suggested this might also be an opportunity, while things were cooling, etc. to help Lewis get his lovely MGB out of mothballs and fire it up. I have greater skills with things mechanical so it seemed an equitable trade.

With tote bag full of the aforementioned ingredients, and some wrenches and sockets thrown in for good measure I headed over to Uncle Lewi’s and we had at it. And it was a lot of fun. Lewis sat facing the kitchen from the dining room side of the bar. “I don’t think I’ve ever sat here before,” he said, which was probably accurate. The kitchen is usually Lewis’ domain. So he sat and gave directions and clearly enjoyed being the boss.

Step by step and piece by piece the cake came together. We did also monkey around with the B, but as those projects can go, we uncovered more problems than we solved and didn’t get it running. But we did cross a few off the list.

Driving to the pot luck, I had huge cake anxiety. It was nestled in a carrier in the back of the car, but every bump of the way – and there are more than enough on my mile of dirt road – I could picture the cake, the beautifully sculpted cylinder of chocolate butter cream becoming a jumbled heap. And then there were traffic lights that turned yellow and red and even though it’s a New Mexico tradition to push that limit as far as physically, never mind legally possible, for one of them I had to get on the brakes and could picture the whole thing sliding and crushing forward. It would have been smart to hire one of those outfits that transports donated spleens and things, but it was too late.

Nope, this is definitely not the movies. By the time I got there I wished I had brought my speed stick. Oh, wait a minute, I don’t have a speed stick. Note to self: get one for just these kinds of circumstances. I opened the hatch and found the cake was fine.

So in I went, cake in hand and had a lovely time. The food and the people and the conversation were great. We all pitched in and gave Dave, one of the hike leaders, and the leader of more than half of the previous 499 gatherings a card stuffed with cash for an outing to REI or wherever he liked. It was as sweet as it gets. And I did meet and talk with a number of interesting women.

But my plumage was sitting over there on the dessert counter… not even remotely attached to me. I hadn’t considered this flaw in my plan. But the cake was disappearing fast and I’m sure people were enjoying it so this was good.

The evening was coming to a close and the crowd thinned out. I went over to the dessert counter to gather up the cake tray and there was R., very pretty and bright and with a mischievous smile. I met R. at a gathering a long time ago, but this evening we hadn’t yet spoken.

“Did you bring that cake?” She asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you make it?”

“Un-huh.” I smiled. “I like to bake.”

“From scratch?”

“Yes.”

She turned to her friend. “He made it from scratch!”

R. pointed out she made the cake beside mine, also chocolate also from scratch, which I sampled and found it had the most delightful hint of cinnamon. And the glaze was just right. We compared notes.

Almost conspiratorial, R. leaned toward me and put her hand on my arm. “What’s in your cake?”

I gave her the run down and we laughed and when I got to the cream she looked at me. “In the frosting.” I said.

“How much?”

I giggled. “Two cups.”

“There’s TWO cups of cream in the frosting!” She said to the woman who was helping herself to a slice.

Gordon Bunker

Photo: Paul Carson, Ruffed Grouse Society