Tuesday, April 6, 2010

You Call that Cake?

This post speaks the truth: If I were to look for a sugarless cake for my kids' birthday (which, for the record, I would never do), I would not look to a wheel of truffle infused aged goat cheese topped with chicken and mashed potatoes made pink with beet juice. The kids would....I can't even begin to say what the kids would do. In fact, if anyone ever served me a "cake" like that, I'm not sure I could be held responsible for my action.

2 comments:

Sue Dickman said...

I don't think I ever recovered from the birthday cake I was fed at a party for a friend with serious food allergies. (She has a no-sugar, no-dairy,no-wheat, no-alcohol kind of diet, which is not her choice but has to be dealt with.) The "cake" was some kind of tofu concoction, perhaps with carob, and really, a wheel of cheese with beet juice might have been a better option (except for the dairy thing). And I was in my 30s when that happened! I can't imagine if I'd been a kid. We do still tease her about it--she claims to have loved the tofu cake--but at her last party, I did notice that there were two desserts--one for her and one for the non-allergic folks (basically everyone else).

I would consider it an interesting challenge to come up with a tasty meal for someone with those food limitations, but I would bail at any dessert besides fruit salad, I think. Though, much as I love fruit salad, it's not much of a birthday cake any more than a wheel of goat cheese is.

Robin Aronson said...

OK. THAT'S a brilliant story.


But i think when faced with allergies like that, you have no choice but to choose fruit over anything else for dessert. It's like cooking for passover (or, as i've learned from vegetarian times magazine)--you can choose to use substitutes to mimic what you can't have (that's what the vegan recipes do in vegetarian times) or you can just have something else entirely. you just have to recategorize -- it's not going to be birthday cake--so let it be something that doesn't even want to be to a birthday cake!