Let them eat cake

Brian Wilson

Last weekend was the annual Holy Rosary Fall Festival.

It is also the reason why on Sunday night, we had four cakes balanced precariously in my cluttered kitchen.

The cakes in question ranged from a very pretty professionally done chocolate cake with white frosting, to one that promised to have almond in the icing. The other two were a pineapple upside down cake and one that my children thought might be a carrot or pumpkin only to discover it is a large banana sheet cake.

As a general rule, one cake is far more than what my household generally needs in any given month, let alone being invaded by four highly-perishable cakes.

For anyone who might want to surprise me with a dessert at work, I am not overly fond of most cakes. Given the choice, I will pick a nice danish, brownie, cookie or slice of pie over a piece of cake.

As with most things, I blame this on my early exposure to mediocre box cake mixes and tubs of pre-made frosting.

Things improved when my family got our first microwave and my older sister Janet went to the free lessons on microwave cooking that the department store held for the people buying these new-fangled devices. In all fairness this was the 1980s, a decade that is not particularly well known for the advancement in culinary arts.

The major takeaways from those lessons was Janet learning to make a chocolate bundt cake that included a whole can of cherries. This remains a favorite of my siblings and one of my all-time favorite cakes.

Which tells you how low my bar is when it comes to cake.

To understand why my family ended up with a cake avalanche, you have to journey back through time with me to the mid-aughts when my daughter Beth was attending school at Holy Rosary. Since the fall festival is a major fundraiser for the school, we would dutifully bring Beth to play the games.

As any parent knows, while you encourage your young children to do their best and want them to be happy, you really are, at best, ambivalent about if they actually win anything. At worst you will actively sabotage their efforts so that they do not bring yet another stuffed animal into your home.

Early on, Beth discovered that the cake walk contest gave the best playing to winning ratio. The rules are pretty basic. There are numbered cards on the ground and the participants walk around in a circle from card to card as the music plays. When the music stops, everyone stands still and they pick a number of who gets a cake that round.

The cakes are made with love and donated by congregation members. Invariably we would come home with three, four or even seven cakes. Occasionally checking to see if we can leave any in people’s unlocked cars on the way home.

As my son Alex grew older and began attending Holy Rosary, Beth passed along her secrets and strategies to cake walk success.

They have far outgrown participating in cake walks, yet my children still find great joy in doing them. I imagine some day far in the future both of them gray-haired and with walkers shuffling around to the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel. My only solace will be that I will likely not be around to end up with cakes cluttering my countertops.

Given all of this, it is actually more surprising that my children stopped at just bringing home four cakes. For all I know there could have been another 10 that were donated back or passed along to some cake-less families.

I like to imagine cakes ending up in good homes where they will be appreciated and loved — this is even better if those homes are not mine.

Perhaps organizers should consider the parents in these things and in addition to the cakes do the same sort of contest but give away wine, beer or other adult beverage. Yes, I realize this plays into the stereotype of Wisconsin residents being well-pickled, but let’s be honest, you know there would be a line of people waiting to play if there was a bottle of wine or brandy on the line.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News.