The Hours

BIRTHDAY CAKE

Early on in my days as a baker, I was given the last-minute task of creating a birthday cake for a high-paying regular customer. My boss was out sick, so the job fell to me, a Duncan Hines cake mix enthusiast with zero formal pastry training and caffeine-shaky hands. In tears, I called my older sister, a professional cake decorator, from the restaurant’s trash closet, pleading with her to leave work and come help me. The best she could do was send me a quick email with some pointers and tricks, which I clung to like the last life vest on a sinking ship, reading and rereading it until I had it memorized.

In the end, the cake was slightly crooked and covered in so many layers of vanilla buttercream my teeth ache to think about it. I dodged the task of writing in icing by making a banner out of brown paper and letter stamps and hid the cake’s frosting imperfections by dumping a layer of white nonpareils all over it. It looked homemade in a way that I hoped would be charming in the restaurant’s dim lighting. The customer was overjoyed, but my chef was horrified, and I was never allowed near a birthday cake order at that restaurant again.

In cooking and baking there is almost always a discrepancy between what you imagine you are capable of creating and what, in the end, comes out of your oven. Sometimes this is a beautiful thing—that soufflé that you were certain would sink? It miraculously rose like a phoenix from the rye-toast ashes of your 1970s Mark Royal oven. And that leg of lamb you were sure you had oversalted? It was a revelation! But sometimes you are certain that what you are going to create will be a masterpiece, a dish so wondrous that it will communicate exactly how much you love the person you made it for and, probably because of these outsized expectations and grandiose plans, you are disappointed with the outcome. For me, this is never truer than with birthday cakes, which come with a tremendous amount of “This is my special day” pressure attached to them.

Ever since I read Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours in my senior year of high school, it is impossible for me to bake a birthday cake without thinking of poor Laura Brown. Laura, a housewife in suburban Los Angeles in the late 1940s, is determined to create the perfect birthday cake for her husband, Dan—a cake that is as “glossy and resplendent as any photograph in any magazine,” one that will “speak of bounty and delight the way a good house speaks of comfort and safety.”

Much like the famous boeuf en daube scene in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which Mrs. Ramsay stresses and panics over the necessity of the stew being absolutely perfect so that all of her guests will know that she is perfect, Laura’s cake is so much more than just a cake. In Laura’s mind, if she can create the perfect cake, it is proof that she can be the perfect wife and mother, that she can be satisfied and fulfilled with her life, and that she can be happy—which she knows she should be and is not.

This is much too much pressure to place on a birthday cake and on herself and it turns out, of course, to be “less than she hoped it would be.” There are crumbs caught in the icing and the “n” in “Dan” is squished from landing too close to the frosting roses. The whole thing “feels small, not just in the physical sense but as an entity.” The breaking point comes when Laura’s neighbor Kitty comes over for coffee and calls Laura’s cake “cute,” sending her into a spiral of agonizing shame over having “produced something cute, when she had hoped (it’s embarrassing but true) to produce something of beauty.” It would have been better, she thinks, never to have tried at all, to have been careless and cavalier and declare herself “hopeless at such projects” than to have been caught trying, and failing. Laura throws the cake in the trash and starts over.

She feels better about the second cake, and despite Laura’s brief, hot rage at the sight of her husband spraying a sheen of spittle across her creation when he blows out the candles her cake is a resounding success. Dan declares it “perfect,” and Laura feels whole for the first time in days.

The secret is, of course, that even the crumbliest, ugliest homemade cake will always, always mean more than the glossiest and sleekest store-bought cake. We know this by now, don’t we? In my life, the cakes that have brought me to tears, that have filled me with such gratitude and love that I feel swollen and glowing, were never beautiful. My favorite cake to make for my friends is a confetti cake, just like the from-a-mix kind you used to beg your parents for every year. It is nostalgic and delicious, and regardless of your cake-decorating skills, it will look beautiful under all those sprinkles.

THE HOURS

Birthday Cake

This recipe produces a triple-layer yellow cake. If you want your cake to be white, substitute 1 cup vegetable shortening for the butter. Sweet butter extract can be purchased online or at specialty baking stores. It gives your cake that boxed-cake taste—in a good, nostalgic way. If you can’t find it or don’t want to use it, substitute 1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract plus ½ teaspoon pure almond extract.

Serves 8 to 10

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1½ cups sugar

2 teaspoons sweet butter extract

3 large eggs, separated (place whites in the refrigerator until ready to use)

2¼ cups cake flour

3½ teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus 1 additional pinch for whipping egg whites

1¼ cups buttermilk

3½ cups rainbow sprinkles (the waxy kind used for ice cream toppings, not shiny sugar crystals, which will melt and disappear during cooking) or nonpareils

Vanilla Buttercream Frosting (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line the bottom of three 8-inch cake pans with parchment paper. Grease the parchment and sides of each pan and dust the pans with flour, tapping out the excess.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and butter extract and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat the egg yolks into the butter mixture, one at a time.

In a bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and add to the butter mixture in three batches, alternating with the buttermilk. Beat until smooth.

Transfer the batter to a large bowl and wash and dry the bowl of the electric mixer. Add the chilled egg whites and a pinch of salt to the mixer bowl and attach the whisk attachment. Whip the whites at medium-high speed until they hold stiff (but not dry) peaks. This can also be done in a large bowl with an electric hand mixer, or with some biceps strength and a whisk.

Using a spatula, gently fold the stiff egg whites into the batter until they are all mixed in. Quickly fold 1½ cups of the sprinkles into the batter (the colors will run quickly, so don’t overmix). Divide the batter evenly among the three prepared cake pans and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 35 minutes. Let the cakes cool in their pans on a cooling rack for a bit before turning them out onto the cooling rack to cool completely.

Place the first cooled cake layer on a cake stand and spread the top with roughly ½ cup of frosting, smoothing until the frosting is in an even layer. Place the second cake on top and repeat. Do this again with the third layer and cover the outside of all three layers with a thin layer of icing. Place the cake in the refrigerator and allow the messy crumb layer of icing to set until it’s completely hardened, 30 to 40 minutes.

Once the crumb coating has set, take the cake out of the refrigerator and frost it with the remaining frosting. Cover in the remaining 2 cups sprinkles and present to the birthday boy or girl.

VANILLA BUTTERCREAM FROSTING

Makes about 6 cups

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

½ cup whole milk

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract (clear, if you can find it, to keep the frosting white)

8 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, combine the butter, milk, vanilla, 4 cups of the confectioners’ sugar, and the salt and beat on medium speed for 3 minutes. Slowly add the remaining sugar, ½ cup at a time, beating well after each addition. Once it is all incorporated, increase the mixer speed to high and beat for 1 more minute.