"Muffins are for people who don't have the nads
to order cake for breakfast."
-- Kitchen Confidential
 |
| Red velvet cake scraps with milk 9-28-14 |
"Shep claimed eating cake like that so early in the morning
was a 'whore's breakfast.'
The rest of them didn't care.
They were happy little whores who didn't worry about saving a morsel."
-- Rebecca Wells, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
We had dinner last night with my beautiful friend Kelly, who happens to be a professional pastry chef.
Kelly operates her own very successful up-and-coming bakery in Providence, RI, but she was home in Ohio over the weekend to be in a friend's wedding, for which she also made the cake.
When professional cake designers build cakes, a lot of the cake falls victim to long, sharp, serrated knives they use to shave and shape the cakes into perfect rounds and squares with perfectly flat sides and tops.
All of the discarded, trimmed-off cake becomes cake scraps.
I worked with Kelly in a local bakery a few years ago, and when there were cake scraps, she'd send them home with me in fondant buckets for the boys. They'd eat it right out of the buckets with their fingers.
I don't see Kelly as often anymore since she moved to Rhode Island. But yesterday she showed up at the restaurant with a cooler full of scraps from the wedding cake she'd made. She brought them all the way from Providence -- about eight pounds of red velvet, lemon, and pumpkin scraps -- enough to make a whole other cake.
When we got home, we immediately dug in. Red velvet cake is a little too messy to eat with your hands, so we scooped it into cereal bowls, covered it with milk and ate it with spoons. It was sweet and squishy and turned the milk delightfully pink.
It wasn't exactly breakfast. It was 10 p.m. And we weren't exactly hungry. We'd eaten huge dinners.
But it was cake.
There's always room for cake, no matter what time it is.
This morning when I got up I found tell-tale red velvet crumbs in the sink, and the milk was all gone. So I'm pretty sure I know what the boys had for breakfast.
Anybody who's ever heard Bill Cosby's schtick about eating cake for breakfast knows it's perfectly acceptable because it's got eggs, milk and wheat. As Cos says, "That's nutrition!"
I don't let my family eat cake for breakfast every day. Sometimes I let them eat cookies and brownies. I blame my grandmother, who always had to have "a little something sweet" with her morning coffee -- donuts, sweet rolls, apple fritters.
Nutritionally speaking, perhaps cake isn't the best breakfast.
Deliciously speaking, it's about as good as it gets.
