About Cakes
By Natalia
I’m going to allow myself a metaphor and compare screenplays and novels to cakes. It is not a beautiful metaphor a writer would be proud of, cakes simply occupy a special place in my life.
In the past, people had religious visions: saints appeared to them. I, however, have visions of cakes. Quite seriously. A slice of three-layer cake suddenly appears before my eyes, hovering there, insistently, and demands that I aspire to it. And I do aspire. But I cannot allow myself to eat cake every time I dream of it.
So I have reached a compromise: I study them. In shops. In cafés. I look at them very carefully, trying to guess their taste just by sight, which, as you know, is very close to writing.
Cakes are brave and infinitely diverse. Every culture and every era has had a hand in them. The layers can be vanilla, chocolate, nut, coffee, honey, green tea, or something else entirely. The batter can be based on whipped eggs, sour cream, or butter. There are endless kinds of frostings and toppings, and some simply refuse to get along with certain types of cake layers. The layers are soaked with syrups to keep them moist. Alcohol is often added to those syrups, which I consider one of the great achievements of civilization.
And then there is an entirely separate universe: making the cake look good. There are countless videos online where cakes are made perfectly even, like little towers. Special tools are used to decorate these towers with colored icings and glazes, caramel, sugar figurines. Somehow they even transfer photographs onto cakes. At this point, the cake begins to resemble a small architectural project.
The cakes available to my study in cafés and pastry shops are, for the most part, rather predictable. If my visions grow too insistent, and the cake that appears to me possesses some particularly extraordinary quality, I occasionally attempt to make it myself. But my God, how difficult it is. A layer may refuse to rise, or rise crooked, making it impossible to cut into three even parts. The cream may turn out too runny, or there may simply not be enough of it. Half an hour in, there is not a single clean dish left. And there is no way of knowing whether it tastes good until the entire thing has been assembled and left to soak for several hours.
If you have ever made a cake yourself, you know what I am talking about. A three-layer cake with full decoration is monstrously difficult to execute well. Usually, my cakes taste wonderful but look dreadful, yet my family loves them and insists that I am a real cake maker. Oh, thank you, but I am not. In cake-making, I am an amateur. A beginner.
But imagine that as an amateur pastry maker, I decided to start selling cakes, and like any reasonable person, I Googled how to do it. I would immediately be buried under advertisements. Various organizations and individuals would eagerly offer, for a modest fee:
Someone would revise my cake so it could finally meet professional standards.
Someone would teach me how to write a proper letter to a pastry agent, in case my cake wished to be represented.
Someone would coach me on how to pitch my cake to the owner of an established pastry shop, in under thirty seconds, with confidence and clarity.
Someone would reveal which cakes are currently trending, and how mine might be adjusted to fit the market.
Someone would train me to perfect the first bite, those crucial opening seconds that determine whether anyone will commit to the rest of the cake.
Someone would help me discover the true voice of my cake and remain faithful to it.
Someone would guide me through my “pastry block,” should I find myself staring helplessly at my food processor, unable to begin.
No, thank you, people. I will not pay for this.
If this is work, then in order to sell cakes, I would have to go and work in a pastry shop and make, and make, and make cakes. Every day. For many days in a row. And I do not want that.
Quite selfishly, I would prefer that someone else suffer, mastering the craft of pastry, spending endless hours making and remaking, while I simply enjoy the result. Because I love cakes, and I need them for happiness.
I would only ask that this pastry chef, who sacrifices their life in pursuit of the perfect cake, and has probably long since stopped loving sweets, make them delicious and beautiful, use good ingredients, and allow themselves imagination. That there be many pastry chefs, and many cakes, of every possible kind, for every taste, including, perhaps, the impossible: not sweet cakes without calories, which I sometimes dream of.
And while they struggle, making cakes for me, I will struggle, writing and rewriting series for them. Our work, after all, is nearly the same: endless practice, and the desire to make something… delicious.
But the pastry chef has one great advantage over me.
If at a party you say, “My cousin will be here soon. She’s a pastry chef, and she’s bringing her signature cake,” everyone is delighted. If you say, “My cousin will be here. She’s a writer, and she will read us chapters from her new book,” no one is.
This, perhaps, is the moment when my original metaphor, about books, films, and cakes, reveals its limits.
© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025. All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.
