“What kind of cake do you want?” my mother asked ahead of my last birthday. Rather than demure and say, “Mom, I’m turning 40—don’t worry about my cake.” I said, “Cannoli!” She replied, with perhaps modicum of exhaustion, “I know cannoli—what kind of frosting and cake?” We decided to go for chocolate cake with fudge frosting. She ordered it massive and round, which I found chic in this era of extra-long rectangles, with white lettering and roses. It was from Alpine Bakery in Smithtown, on Long Island, long our preferred cake source. (I’ve requested interviews with them; they’ve refused all press—chic.)

As a kid, I would’ve leapt at the cake to demand the roses. For this birthday, I demanded my sister light it with her phone so that I could get a nice shot. I’m not sure whether I ate any of the roses at all, which shows I’ve matured.

Because of my baking background, I ended up on the cake beat for a few years. I mostly wanted to talk about decorating trends, which is why I wrote about the emergence of “perfect” cakes in the post-fondant era for Munchies in 2018 (!), in contrast to something like what Martha Stewart and Julia Child created as a wedding cake in this video; and then the development of an “organic” style of cake, for this newsletter; and then the “messy” cake for T—the latter two both in 2021, a big year for Instagram pastry trends. 

For the last five years, though, I’ve been more or less out of the cake conversation, mostly because it became a lot to keep up with and I found myself unable to muster up interest in cake picnics and other displays of opulence at the end of the world. Of course, other writers took up the mantle and have done a great job. The cake beat is good work, if you can get it.

Cake is naturally celebratory, whether at a birthday or a wedding, or it’s a consolation, like a sweet afternoon treat on a bad day, when all our bodies want is a little sugar and comfort. But it all got to be too much for me to think about, and as much as I want to believe I’m above being quieted or alienated by trends, I stopped paying attention to something I’ve always loved simply because I found the over-the-topness of both the displays and the flavors… boring! The expectation of it all, the pomp—not for me.

Those flavor combinations, like a lemon cake with a salty coconut milk soak and blueberry-yuzu swiss meringue buttercream or a citrus–olive oil sponge cake layered with (I am literally making these up as I go) bay leaf–infused fig jam. This is all good stuff—this is the stuff that pushes possibilities and imaginations forward.

But I never got excited about it, which is to say they never sounded like something I’d want for my birthday. (This is why I kept quiet while understanding the frustration chronicled in last year’s Cut piece “Enough With the Ugly Cakes.”) I like to develop recipes where I try to find the clearest expression of one to three flavors. In my private response, I found myself pulling it all back more and more. If the cake couldn’t be good with just a simple dusting of powdered sugar (or, in one instance, an entire caramelized sweet plantain) then I didn’t want to serve it or write it up. (There’s an On Eating preorder offer below, which includes one of said cakes: pumpkin-walnut snacking cake.)

That cannoli and fudge birthday cake, though—it was so good that I’m just announcing myself as a person who loves a very traditional cake. For me, a person from Long Island, cannoli is traditional. Keep out those little gelatin candies that always ruined them for me as a kid. Chocolate chips are ok but they gild the lily just a bit. I’ll try your passionfruit-cardamom curd spread between layers of spicy blood orange cake, but I won’t be exclaiming about it to my mom. I’m a person who wants her to always know precisely which flavor I want, with a little room for conversation about the frosting.