Cake and Empire

Tzompantli Cake

2009-07-27T23:12:00.013-07:00

The Tzompantli cake is a follow-up cake of sorts to the Chacmool cake. It was made for friend M for her birthday and the subject matter is due to her interests in things related to bone and archaeology. It was a bit of challenge for me because I really don’t know all that much about bone anatomy. I mean, I like sculpting people (mostly their heads) but I can’t say I have much understanding of what goes underneath. This is doubtless a serious weakness as knowing the underlying anatomy is supposed to help make one a better artist! Oh well. First off, I’d better tell you what a tzompantli actually is supposed to represent.

A tzompantli means “wall/rack of skulls” (more or less) in Classical Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. A skull rack is a place where skulls are placed in a rack and unlike the medieval European tradition of bone curation, mostly these skulls are from sacrificial victims or fallen enemy warriors. These were presumably displayed at public places near public buildings and edifices. At least, that appears to be the idea.

Of course, bone curation was also practiced for family members too, so it’s not like it was just limited to “trophy” skulls but in the case of the rack, it seems that those who occupied it were enemies or captives. So, basically, a tzompantli is another version of a public human sacrifice/warfare memorial, except presumably some of the skulls could have been captured in battle as well as removed under more ceremonial circumstances like a ballgame. So making a tzompantli cake makes a nice addition to my cake repertoire of Mesoamerican human sacrifice monuments.

Honestly, I can’t recall that many skulls have been found in archaeologically recovered contexts with the correct lobes removed or holes for placement in racks, so this may have been a practice that was somewhat more limited or specialized than what the conquistador Bernal del Castillo suggests (his numbers are very high). At this point, it is something that is difficult to know.

However, we do know that they are represented in some of the codices as almost abacus-like structures with skulls as the beads. Most of these post-date the Spanish Conquest so it really is hard to know whether they are all that accurate. We have to just go with what we have for now.

To do my tzompantli cake I had to make some structural decisions. Did I want skull shaped cakes that I could stack together as a rack or did I want to make a regular old cake and merely decorate it with skulls made from fondant? This time, I decided to stick to doing the cake with fondant skulls. For one thing, although I had plastic skull molds for making sugar skulls for the Day of the Dead, I didn't actually have any mold that could withstand oven temperatures. I did see some skull pans once but the details on them were woefully inadequate. Friend M has actually taken quite a bit of bone anatomy and would have doubtless been disappointed with them!

As I’ve said earlier, I wasn’t that good at molding the skulls. As you can see below they really ended up resembling gorilla skulls. Well, sort of…put it this way, had you opted for a statistical shape analysis of my fondant skulls you would have concluded that the individuals in question suffered from all sorts of rare and unusual maladies. You might also have concluded that they were evidence of a now extinct race of polar space gorillas. You know, I did once have access to a 3d scanner, perhaps it would be a fun exercise for next time!

The good thing about doing a skull rack for a friend is that you can also render their head alongside all the other “victims”. In this case I thought it would be better if I did a head with flesh still on it, so it would be recognizably hers. As you can see, it does sort of look like a human head, perhaps a bit too much of a Barbie-like expression but then, I don’t actually know what decapitated fresh heads look like much less what type of expressions are common so it could be just right. I opted to sculpt the head and the features entirely of different colors of fondant rather than paint the features onto the head. I thought painting on the fondant, while it would produce a more realistic head, might make the monochromatic white fondant skulls appear a little to different and fake-looking by comparison. I suppose I was going for more of a "fake" fun style in this case rather than gorey. Perhaps next time I'll go for horribly accurate.

Finally, I attempted to use lollipop sticks to make the requisite “rack” for the skulls. Believe it or not, it did actually stay up but the big problem I found was that the skulls kept spinning and staying at awkward angles more suggestive of a child’s toy or a really macabre abacus rather than a real skull rack.

This is where some more details on skull rack practice would have helped. It’s possible that they used a method other than the simple obvious method of "impale the skulls with a stick and put on rack"…they may have been attached by other means or secured by some other device to the stick. Or it could be that my skulls (being solid and ill-proportioned) were so “off” in their measurements and weight that they simply didn’t behave like real skulls would. I suspect that it’s a combination of the two, I don’t know how the rack worked and I messed up the skull proportions. It would be easy to find out with real skulls but I had cake to finish making. Besides, I don’t have access to labs where they work with skulls at my university and I suspect that they would look askance at anything that might require er, drilling holes into them to see how I could hang them on a rack! But it would be a nice side research project for the history/discovery channel types. I hope they get right on that.

Finally, I just laid the rack directly onto the cake surface so that all the skulls (and fleshed head) were laying in the correct manner. The cake was basically a simple and yummy platform for the actual skull rack. It was a golden buttercream cake with a simple american style confectioner's sugar buttercream (arizona is too hot generally to use any other kind without some access to near constant refrigeration). You can see the happy result below.

Naturally, everyone got their own skull.

Establishing a Painting Tradition

2009-01-20T23:10:00.015-07:00

I’ve never been that much of a painter. My watercolors were really terrible as a kid and I haven’t really tried them since I was twelve. In retrospect I was too impatient as a kid to let layers dry and although some of them started out well, they invariably ended rather badly with lots of unintended purple brown streaks. The one exception I can think of is when I used watercolor merely as a fill-in color to some pencil drawing I’d done and it turned out okay. It was the “medieval illuminated manuscript” birthday card I’d done for my father (I have a whole manuscript/ancient document tradition for his birthday). Actually, I believe my stepmother H “corrected” that one as I always have trouble staying between the lines. Even my own! The one attempted painting I did with oil (well I was nine and my mother had optimistically gotten me some paint by number thing) was something appalling. Actually, I ignored the numbers carefully labeling the under-drawing on the canvas type board and painted a few people (it was supposed to be a landscape). My mother never purchased one of those again.

Having recited that dismal history of my non-illustrious painting past, I do love to draw. I’ve drawn pencil sketches and attempted a few charcoal drawings and lots of pastels, crayons, pens, magic markers, and even sharpies. Mostly what I’ve tended to draw are people. Okay, when I was really little I drew ballet dancers and then I went thru a horses phase although the only part of the horse I was good at was the head. Actually, mostly the part of people that I can sketch with any decency at all is the head up to the shoulders; after that, things get a bit sketchy. Occasionally hopeful friends and family members have purchased various books on anatomy and the human form in the hopes that I will get better at drawing the entire human body. I usually read the books avidly and then still find myself quite unable to draw them. I think it’s because that’s not the part of people that interests me most. It’s not that I don’t admire beautiful body proportions. In fact, I love three dimensional figural sculptures but somehow I just haven’t gotten the hang of it producing it in drawing form. My first impulse doodle is a face, often in profile, and then the face head-on and I’m typically obsessed with hair, which never gets drawn realistically enough for me.

In addition to people I also like sketching flowers and mostly I stick to those subjects. Although once I was required to draw dozens of different types of squirrels using crayons. Perhaps one day I will attempt a squirrel sketch on a cake but only if it’s for friend T, who might appreciate a rodent portrait on his cake!

One thing all of my drawings seem to have in common is that they are messy. The nice interpretation is that they are more evocative of the subject rather than attempting something like a hyper realistic Audubon print.

Of course, cakes are not typically the medium in which one sketches or watercolors, one either does or does not have designs on the surface! The cakes as ceramics turned out okay because the kind of ceramics I was attempting happened to be fairly “messy” themselves so that despite the repetitiveness of the designs, the occasional slip-ups were a little less obvious. I have attempted drawings of flowers on cakes before, such as the poppies in a previous cake, but in that case I was directly painting the wet food coloring on the cake without diluting it with vodka and letting it dry in layers (like water colors) or by mixing the colors themselves as one would in an oil painting. In a sense, these simpler brushed designs can be considered a trial run for the more complicated techniques and designs that I attempted here.

All of my recent attempts involved flowers, which I am relatively comfortable sketching but uncertain at producing exact lines! My first attempt was cherry blossoms and a baby sparrow on a birthday cake for friend R. I picked cherry blossoms for him because I figured he’d like them and they seemed similar in visual effect to other much tinier flowers I’d seen him admire.
Besides, I also have good memories of visiting the cherry blossoms that were originally a gift to the US from Japan in the tidal basin in the DC area with my Japanese grandmother, who was also fond of them and liked the back-story.

I decided to include a fledgling swallow because I had the pleasure of watching four little eggs grow from naked hatchlings to finally fledging on the porch of the laboratory I was staying in this past summer. It was a real treat! And they were really adorably cute, as you can see below.

Here they are as hatchlings.

Here they are as fledglings having just fledged!

So how to put the sketches on the cake? I decided to stick to a familiar method using the same luster dust I’d used in previous cakes and simply use a little bit of vodka as a thinner and paint directly onto the fondant as if it were a canvas. Using just luster dust vodka paint, I knew I could achieve a painted design that would dry.

Here are two overviews of R’s cake:

A detail:

For R’s cake I used all metallic luster powders so in person they all gleamed like matte glittery metal. The effect is, alas, not really apparent in the photos I took. It was a devil’s food cake.

The next attempt was for friend D. I’ve made ceramic style cakes for her before but this time I wanted to do a flower painting so I asked her which one she liked best. In this case she came up with an answer, the Mexican bird of paradise. Actually, what she really said was, “I don’t know; whatever it is that’s blooming right now, I like those flowers.”

It seemed kind of hard to draw because leaves are fern-like, but I gave it a go here, using different shades of green to try and get a more realistic feel to the leaves. I can’t say that I succeeded at much more than “evocative” here because, frankly, I’ve had so little practice or mentoring. I definitely need more practice, but it was fun at least getting something that wasn’t embarrassing at least! I had help from friend L, whose hand is barely visible in the picture, in getting the colors a little more right.

Also, this cake design really was more like a watercolor/oil painting because I had to mix shades and overpaint, which I hadn’t really done very much with the cherry blossoms. The flowers came out a bit better than the leaves did in my opinion, probably because I’ve had more practice at sketching flower forms and they’re really the part of the flower that I pay the most attention to anyways. This was actually fun to do and I also used non luster colors so the results were very bright, which is a nice effect! You can see Mr. PB stealing some extra fondant on the side…

D’s cake was a pound cake vanilla number I think she’s liked in past years, a golden buttercream cake.

Finally, although this wasn’t really a painted sketch, I did actually attempt a combination of 3d and painted effects in a really large birthday cake I did for another friend. Friend RK likes purple so I decided to try my hand at purple gumpaste orchids accented with painted stems and decorative accents that were all painted in the same fashion as the previous flowered cakes. I liked the effect of combining the two methods, but I think there are ways I could be more sophisticated about it. That’s really the fun part about making these cakes, with all of them, there’s always a lot of room for improvement and each one contributes something to the next.

As an aside, I also realized one shouldn’t experiment with a new type of gumpaste that seemed nicer to model but unfortunately far too delicate when dried. I lost about half of the flowers I constructed originally because they were so fragile they broke when I was assembling them in the final stage.

This last cake was red velvet. It's a quintessentially Southern cake, so I've been exposed to it at church potlucks and social events for as long as I can remember. Someday I will devote an entire blog to the subject of red velvet cake. However, my feelings about its origins and its curious sour and sweet flavor are far too complicated to summarize easily, much like my feelings about my birthplace!

Personally, one thing I feel unequivocally positive about is its color, which is magnificently visible below.

Calendar Stone Cake

2008-10-09T16:26:00.013-07:00

I’ve always wanted to do a cake of the Calendar stone, which is actually the sacrificial stone of Motecuhzoma II, one of the last rulers of the Aztec Triple Alliance empire.

This cake is the latest in a string of Mesoamerican monument cakes undertaken here at Cake and Empire. It is also one of my most ambitious to date. Partly this is because the details are extremely unforgiving and there are many different levels of relief to evoke, as the image below can attest!

The stone itself is huge, spanning about 12 meters across. The skill of execution alone is breathtaking. The demonstration of obvious technical prowess combined with many levels of relief carving and a complex design but eye-pleasing design make it one of the most beautiful of the Aztec monuments. It was originally uncovered in the late 18th century in Mexico City (1790) which was built on top of the prehispanic capital of Tenochtitlan. It has been dubbed the Calendar stone because it depicts dates, including the twenty day month signs and the four previous “suns” or universes in the Aztec mythological cycle as represented by earth (jaguar), air, water, and fire. The present age is the fifth sun and is shown emerging from the underworld in the center of the stone.

According to the experts (in my case, Emily Umberger) the stone was probably painted but many mold castings later, the paint is only supposition, though based on known historical examples of painted monuments. She’s seen the stone up close and in person so she told me many details about it that I wouldn’t otherwise have known. For example, there is damage on the central part of the stone on the central “sun face” that isn’t due to taphonomic processes but rather to use wear most likely related to human sacrifice.

I attempted to portray the wear patterns in the cake design itself, as you can see below.

To those of raised in more antiseptic religious traditions that employ grape juice rather than real blood, use wear from religious sacrifice is a little unsettling. As a kid I used to wonder if real sacrifice rather than metaphoric made it more powerful or whether it would become routine like Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. At any rate, we can be certain that it meant something significant to those who built and used these stones.

Of course, everything that is known about the stone and its original creators is complicated. Even the use of the term Aztec is fraught in academic circles, most people who use it now seem to have to engage in a lengthy aside as to what, precisely, they mean by it. Wiki has a decent entry here on the Aztecs that includes a bibliography for the interested reader.

Aside from the complex set of contexts and information attached to this monument in prehispanic times, and which remain rather obscure to me, its importance in modern Mexico interests me as well. It’s the most ubiquitous image of ancient Mexico and it is plastered on almost everything in modern Mexico as well. The Calendar stone really is used to as a representation of modern Mexico, it’s almost like a flag but better. Whatever its older meanings and usages, it has come to represent modern Mexico in a way that appears to crosscut any regional or ethnic identity. I think that is really what attracted me to attempting a cake representation.

I decided to make the scale one inch equals one meter, given the level of details in the piece. I used my favorite commercially available fondant, fondx to sculpt the different details. I did it piecemeal using the shapes of the glyphs to mold each piece separately to the right scale, figuring I could put them all together on the finished cake.

This time I wasn’t really able to make much use of any template cutouts from Emily’s drawing; instead, I had to really just use them as a sculpting guide because the level of relief and detail was too great. I think it *might* have helped if I’d been better able to recognize each of the representations of the iconographic items used. For example, the deer in the day month glyph boxes looked rather dog-like to me, so I just directly imitated what I saw from the drawing and picture rather than what I thought a deer should look like. My understanding from others with much more experience in epigraphy is that it is better to be completely familiar with the visual corpus prior to attempting what I did. Oh well.

The project turned out to be an incredibly labor intensive task, taking a total of 12 hours to finish sculpting each piece to the correct scale. Of course, it’s the most fun I’ve had with fondant in a while and it’s also the most elaborately constructed cake I’ve ever made for just me rather than for friends. I wasn’t as exacting as I could have been; there is definitely room for improvement on a future version!

For example, I left off the nemontoni (the unlucky extra days from a solar year) that were represented as glyphs right around the main sun face. I was tired at that point and I figured the missing tiny dots would go unnoticed (I figured incorrectly as it turns out). I also left out the bells that adorn the serpent figureheads that encircle the edge of the stone that probably represent the watery underworld (and would therefore perhaps have been painted turquoise). Funnily enough, no one noticed the missing bells. I think this is because the level of dimensional detail was sufficiently daunting that the eye overlooks it while the nemontoni really stood out on their own despite their tininess. Of course, I’d rather get every obsessive detail in, but I think in truth it would be slightly different each time I attempted it.

This time I felt a minor twinge while cutting the cake, almost as if I should have performed some other ceremony prior to its destruction and enjoyment. Something about the formality and obvious excessive labor of the cake combined with a group of people just standing around waiting to eat it may have lent to my wanting something more for a brief moment!

Cakes and Miniatures

2008-05-30T17:02:00.026-07:00

This is a blog about cakes and miniatures.

My step-mother, H, also collects dolls and, more importantly, doll accoutrements. In particular, she collects “playscale” doll stuff (aka, the right size for Barbie) rather than the itsy bitsy miniatures that used to fascinate me as a kid in doll museums. Due to her interest in doll stuff, and her own interest in sculpting doll food she persuaded me to attempt making a miniature replica of a wedding cake I’d recently made. Most of the cakes I’ve done required a certain amount of sculpting so despite my relative inexperience in that art in a non-food medium, I decided to give it a whirl.

H helpfully got me a book on polymer clays and more importantly, she got me some basic tools and clays to get started. Basically, tinfoil can be used as an armature by making tinfoil base "cakes" and then one can treat the clay exactly like fondant and use it to cover and decorate the faux cake.

The first cake I attempted was a version of the art deco and paisley wedding cake sans the paisley elements because I thought they might be too ambitious in something this small. First I made the tinfoil "cakes" and covered them with clay. H helped me roll out the clay and make the tiny round ball borders.

Next I stacked the finished tiers together and added the detail work.

The next step was making the black and white lotuses. It was actually a lot easier sculpting polymer clay even though the scale was challenging because I found it to be a lot less sticky than fondant!

After that I had to make some choices. Although I really liked the original cake topper deco line drawing in royal icing on the wedding cake, I didn't think I could get it to look right at this small a scale. The contrast between the deco lotuses and the teensy line drawing would be significant. I thought something bolder would show up better so I opted for a different design. H can be shown holding her cake just prior to baking so you can get a nice visual sense of playscale.

My dad helped out by making the cake platform. It was a real family affair.

Finally, the finished and baked cake.

And the original wedding cake below for comparison!

The next miniature I attempted was one of Mr PB's favorites, the daisy cake as seen previously here.

First I added the stems. Then the flowers, color by color.

I couldn't manage the same level of details in the flowers for the miniature cake as I did for the original. The mini-cake was truly too mini.

Finally the finished cake.

The original real cake is below:

And here's the finished clay cake with a better scale, since I muffed the one with the measuring tape.

Finally, I made a miniature of a birthday cake I made for Mr. Pretzel Bender.

Here's Mr. PB's original cake. It was devil's food (what else?) covered in fondant and painted with a metallic blue luster dust with silver fondant damask-pattern like accents.

And the miniature cake below!

I have mixed feelings about making miniature cake replicas. They don't smell good (polymer clay smells like playdoh but saltier), they don't taste good er...can't be eaten.

I enjoyed the experiment, and will probably make more of these for H, but I think I prefer real cake because they can be enjoyed and then finished.

They don't last; I like that.

Chacmool Cake

2007-12-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

This cake combines three interests of mine, Mesoamerica, cakes, and sculpting into one hobby. It is also a follow-up, of sorts, to the Coyolxauhqui cake that I did earlier this year. I did this one for a friend as well, friend M as a birthday/celebration cake of sorts. M is interested in the physical anthropology side of archaeology (i.e. bones). So I figured that some kind of sacrifice stone/skull rack theme was in order. I will attempt a tzompantli one of these days, but they are awfully repetitive (rows of skulls) and a cake (unless it was huge) could only give an impressionistic view of the whole. So I went with a probable sacrifice stone/sculpture that I haven’t attempted yet, a chacmool.

A chacmool is a type of sculpture “in the round” that popped up in Mesoamerican sites over one thousand years ago. As far as I know, they number in a few dozen at most. Their purpose is not entirely clear, though their general iconography combined with a vessel or plate positioned suspiciously over their chests, and their location on or around temples is strongly suggestive of religious offerings and sacrifice.

Chacmools are found in host of different Mesoamerican centers but the two most recognizable ones (and the ones where the largest amounts have been found) are Tula and Chichen Itza. There are differences among chacmools in both execution and iconography, but in general they are stone statues of reclining figures with their knees drawn up and their hands holding a plate or vessel over their chest/stomach area and their heads pulled up as if they are doing a sit-up with their heads facing towards one side. There are variations in clothing although most seem to have loincloths and some kind of necklace or pendant. And they all have similar headgear that appears to reference Tlaloc (the rain god). The level of detail and refinement in the features (for example, the face) also vary a great deal. Of course, some of these could have been plastered and painted originally, which may have afforded a level of detail that is no longer apparent. The eyes and mouth in the examples I’ve seen from Tula are really schematic rather than fleshed out like the Aztec example.

I decided to base my cake on a chacmool from Tula. I had several aesthetic and practical reasons to choose this one. This sculpture appealed to me because it has clean lines with the legs and arms not as detached from the blocky body. Also, to my sensibility it appeared less gawky than the Aztec chacmools and less “leggy” than the one from Chichen Itza (see the comparison again here). But most important of all, it is the only one from Tula that still has a head!

The block shape of the body and the square angular proportions of the arms and legs also made it easier to do in cake form. Cake pans do curves in two dimensions (the familiar round edge of the most common type of cake pans) but not so much in adding freestanding arms and legs, at least, not without using way too much fondant to achieve the effect that the cake matrix doesn’t provide. Also, given my disastrous experience with hemispheres (as when I made the UFO cake), I figured blocky was more stable.

Here’s a picture of the Tula chacmool below.

For a rectangular body, I could simply make a square cake. I used my big square cake pan (the one I typically use for groom cakes) that is 12 x 12 inches. First, I used a two layer cake recipe to make two complete cake layers. Next, I cut each layer in half and stacked three of them on top of each other for the cake body.

You can see the layers stacked below.

Using three layers also made contouring for the feet and shoulders and upper back a lot easier too.

I had to mold the feet separately and then attach them on the cake feet cutouts. They are messy of course, but I kind of like the stubby toes perched on giant sandals of the cake. I particular like this close up of the feet below.

For the head, I took the unused half of one of the layers and used my large biscuit cutter to cut out three cake “rounds” that I could stack atop each other to provide the base for the head. You can see the head layers in the process of being messily iced below. I thought that making a tube shaped base for the head and neck and then sculpting the face separately of fondant and attaching it with plastic straw sections would achieve something closer to the appearance of the original sculpture.

I ended up using a combination of appliqué and molding to get the look of the body. I decided to stick with the basically smooth white fondant rather than coloring it grey and making irregular pockmarks (in imitation of the basalt rock used to make the original). I suppose it was an aesthetic choice since I am going for an overall look rather than an exact replica in this case. You can see the body below prior to the attachment of the head.

I attached the head using plastic straws (two) inserted into the cake body and head for stability. You can see it completed and “in situ” below immediately prior to munching.

The initial cut depicting the cake’s stratigraphy.

Here’s a view from the top. I toyed with the idea of putting a faux heart on top of the vessel clasped between the two hands but nixed it in the end. It seemed too obvious and I'm not sure anyone there would have wanted to eat a giant fondant candy heart so it would have gone to waste.

Finally, a picture of me holding the disembodied head after the rest of the chacmool cake had been demolished. I gave it to my committee chair, who else?

Cakes as Ceramics

2007-10-10T14:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve always liked the idea of using ceramic decorative styles as an inspiration for cake decorating. So far I have limited my efforts to creating decorations that are merely reminiscent of the actual ceramic on various birthday cakes for friends and family. The two ceramic decorative styles that I’d tried up till now include Blue Delft and one that I fancied was at a little like “Chinese porcelain”. Both have cobalt blue painted designs on a white surface.

Blue Delft I’ve tried for a few years with very limited success. I can’t say that I ever got even close in color when I tried using the “brushed embroidery” look with royal icing. I got a better Blue Delft look when I tried it on my cake printer using one of the plate designs (altered to get the colors a little clearer) on my own birthday cake this year. I used the kind of rolled fondant (Fondx) that tastes good and can produce a wonderful lustrous smooth surface.

You can see it below.

Still, I wasn’t really satisfied. For one thing, the colors in the frosting sheet tend to bleed and blur after only a few hours and they don’t adhere well to a rolled fondant surface (this was prior to my subsequent experimentation with vegetable fat as glue).

The “Chinese porcelain” was a better attempt at ceramic design.

Actually, I used a modern version of a Talavera (a Mexican glazed ceramic) plate for inspiration. Talavera is neither Chinese nor porcelain, it is earthenware, meaning it was fired at much lower temperatures than true porcelain and does not include the requisite feldspar which was the secret sauce for the real thing. Talavera is the Mexican version of the Spanish maijolicas (glazewares) that dates to colonial times. The modern Talavera plate I used had a non-traditional heron bird in its center, in addition to the almost “busy” blue paint designs in the shape of plant like fronds and drops that seem to take up all the available space in the Talavera style.

I wanted the craqueleure look of some china (real porcelain supposedly doesn’t develop the fine cracks that are due firing temperature differentials) and figured that quick pour fondant was the way to go. Quick pour fondant is a kind of sugar glaze typically flavored with almond and the most common decoration of petit fours, those little rectangular cakes covered in frosting that are sweet enough to make your teeth hurt.

So, I made the cake and poured on the quick pour fondant which I’d never tried before and discovered two things at once. The first thing is that the stuff dries remarkably quickly so you have to get a nice even pour onto your surface the first try. The second is that the recipe I used was a little too much for my cake so I ended getting a fair amount on myself, the counter, and the floor. Luckily I’d had the forethought to do the pouring onto the cake prior to it being put onto a plate otherwise I’d have had a puddle of fondant and a cake floating on it on my plate.

The surface cracked up nicely (barely visible but still there) and it was nice and smooth and shiny, just like I had hoped. You can see the slight cracking below.

For the painted design, I opted to use paste food coloring. Paste food coloring is highly concentrated edible (or at least non-toxic) pigment that appears (from the ingredient list) to be suspended in some combination of glycerin and corn syrup. It is used in lieu of liquid food coloring because it does not alter the composition of the dough or icing like water would. It doesn’t really go bad though it can get “gummy” in texture over time.

Paste food coloring is typically used in icings, gum paste, fondant, and I suppose, cookies. I guess you could use it in cakes, though I have used liquid food coloring for cakes on those rare occasions that I have felt the need to dye a birthday cake green.

I decided to paint the design directly onto the fondant glaze using the unadulterated paste color as paint. This proved to be a mixed strategy. The fondant glaze was not hard but soft-ish with a crust, so painting on its surface proved difficult and also a tiny bit damaging. Also, it turned out that the paste color “navy” was the closest to cobalt blue on the white surface than any other color I had.

You can see the design and the cake up close below.

The one above is still my favorite decorated cake, but I don’t always like using a fondant glaze, so I tried out a variation on the painted ceramic theme a year later on a rolled fondant surface.

Once again, I painted a poppies design directly onto the cake’s surface. I didn't use a ceramic tradition directly to inspire this one, although I am fond of the poppy designs seen on some lacquer vessel work done in metal and glass. I used the food paste colors to paint the design. This is an ultimately flawed approach (although the colors are vivid) because as far as I know, they don’t dry. At least, probably not in the time that it takes to eat the cake. So, they may leave more color than I would like on the cake eaters themselves than I would like! Plus, if you make a mistake, you can’t really wipe it off and try again. The dye is VERY strong.

I made them for the same person, friend R, so he’s probably used to it by now…still, I wanted improvement.You can see the poppies here. The very nice script was not produced by me but by a fellow friend of R’s who, as you can see, has exquisite handwriting!

As an aside, I found out later that the Wilton baking Product Company had some product called “brush-on-color” available in rather bright shades for fondant application via stamps or brushes that would presumably dry. However, I didn’t care for their shades and I think they may be discontinued, so I wanted another solution for establishing a painting tradition on fondant covered cakes.

I decided to try a solution that I had used earlier on the UFO and Dalek cakes to apply metallic powder colors to fondant by painting them on in a vodka solution. The vodka evaporates leaving behind the paint. Why not for designs and regular colors? I figured they must have powder colors for practically every shade. They did. So I purchased a few for my next ceramic project.

This time I wanted to make one from a Mesoamerican ceramic type, Chalco/Cholula Polychrome. The friend for whom this cake was to be made studies the region and the ceramics in question. Additionally, friend D had pictures of the ceramics that would prove helpful in its reproduction in cake form.

By way of background, the two names refer to a region and a center, respectively. The Chalco region is the area in the southeastern Basin of Mexico that produced highly decorated elaborate polychromes in the Postclassic period. Cholula is a large site in central Puebla that has a lengthy occupational period, was known as a prehispanic religious/pilgrimage site, and also produced distinctive highly decorated elaborate polychromes that appear to have seen wider trade in the Postclassic period (time of the Aztecs, roughly speaking). The reason two names are attached to this particular ceramic type is because it is apparently difficult to distinguish vessels from the Chalco region from vessels from Cholula (though I imagine chemical sourcing helps). Here are some examples I used for inspiration.

The polychromes in question also apply a distinctive painting technology that involves double slipping. Slipping is a solution of clay and other minerals (often for color and surface treatments) added to water that is thin enough to be poured over the surface of already formed and partially dried clay vessels. Double slipping is exactly what it sounds like, pouring a second layer of slip on top of a previous slipped and dried layer.

For the Chalco/Cholula polychromes, it appears that double slipping was done by first applying a white slip and then an orange or orange/red slip on top of the white slip. Next, painted decorations or incising or a combination of the two would be applied. The double slipping has the effect of making the orange and orange/red distinctively “bright” in appearance. It is a technique that would appear to make the identification of these double slips *almost* apparent even without the occasional incising and rubbing off of the top orange slip that allows the white to peep through underneath.

Incidentally, double-slipping is one of those techniques often associated with Chalco/Cholula ceramics but it apparently also occurs earlier in other parts of Mesoamerica. At least, it does in the Gulf Lowlands. It is called “laca” in Spanish, which I believe simply means lacquer, a term which has been loosely applied to anything that produces a shiny hard surface though of course no actual resin is involved, just paint.

To get the “white slip” look, I simply covered the cake (golden buttercream) with white rolled fondant. Next, I used the vodka and a brush to apply the orange powder pigment to the surface. As you can see below, the colors are very bright and the brush application adds a certain look to the surface that is at least reminiscent of real double slipping.

In the end I achieved a very bright orange. And having seen a few samples of the Gulf versions of double-slipping, they can be vivid.

Next I applied the painted designs using powdered red and black pigments. The designs were based on actual Chalco/Cholula Polychromes from a museum collection.
Side design elements added below.

Top framing swirl added below.

Top design elements added below. I made the white circles by scraping off the orange paint and filling in the middle with red paint. That technique appeared to get the best approximate look of the ceramic designs from the photos.

Here's a close up of the top center below.

As you can see I mixed and matched a few design elements that I liked rather than copying any one pot wholesale. I imagine this kind of thing was done by the original potters themselves. The ceramic designs themselves weren’t that hard to imitate, although admittedly I lack the painting skill and technique of the original potters and I did choose the "easy" designs.

Of course, archaeologists attempt to guess at the motivations and reasons behind imitation because they can tell a lot about the people making them. And getting at the political, economic, and social implications from such residue is always a complicated process.

Sometimes imitation is the result of local artisans trying to compete with the distinctive beauty of Chinese porcelain for a European elite market (they invented bone china in the process). Elites often acquire exotic imported materials in social competition with each other and also because they've been trained to cultivate such tastes!

Other times imitation is the result of political relationships, the client states of imperial New Kingdom Egypt cultivated having Egyptian serving and eating vessels (though they did not use other items in the Egyptian ceramic repertory related to, for example, burial practices) possibly as a signal of their special relationship with Egypt.

Of course, generally it's not as simple as I am making it sound. Most imitation combines social, political, and economic factors.

People can be annoyingly messy in their motivations.

My own efforts at cake ceramic simulacra have similarly mixed motivations. Tragically, I am not required to analyze cake imitations for a living (though I imagine one could compare the decorative traditions of say, Australia with the US and get interesting results).

Perhaps another time.

For now, I can just happily eat cake and not worry about the subtext of recreating antiquities in cake form.

Here's the full view of the Chalco/Cholula Polychrome Cake:

Coyolxauhqui Cake

2007-08-20T15:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve wanted to attempt an Aztec monument cake for a long time. For one thing, many of them (the sacrifice stones in particular) are already conic sections, making their appearance as cakes an obvious choice. Additionally, the fact that I study around the same time period as the Aztecs in Veracruz (before the Empire) makes an edible replica all the more tempting. All I needed now was an excuse to waste the time on it.

The opportunity finally presented itself when a friend and colleague moved away.

CG recently finished his PhD on Aztec period economics and politics so he’s interested in Aztec materials as well. I’d talked to him about my idea of doing an Aztec monument cake, and he asked me to do one of the Coyolxauhqui stone, an 8 ton monument that was found in 1978 in the middle of Mexico City in what would have been the base of the Templo Mayor, the main temple of prehispanic Tenochtitlan. Some of the officemates and friends he’d worked with for the past few years put together an informal going-away luncheon for the occasion.

The Coyolxauhqui stone itself is similar in appearance to the sacrifice stones whose imagery links them to warfare and were dedicated (and associated) with individual Aztec emperors. The sacrificial stone that most people are probably familiar with is the “calendar stone” that served as the sacrificial stone of Motecuhzoma II. According to the experts, the relief sculptures on the stones themselves are packed with allusions and deploy complex metaphors surrounding the politics of the various Aztec conquests. This, unsurprisingly, occasionally involved a lot of elaborate insults which were no doubt understood quite well by their intended audiences.

Obviously, there’s no point in relaying a really fine well-thought out insult packed with metaphors and allusions and having it sail over someone’s head, is there?

I even have a modern equivalent of elaborate insulting practices by warring civil factions. I am thinking of the ASU and U of Arizona football rivalry, of course!

Every year, an annual game is held between the two rival teams around Thanksgiving. My knowledge of college football is very scanty, but my dim understanding is that this particular game is not remotely key to deciding much in the way of national standings or bowl game placement. Its sole purpose seems to be to decide bragging rights for a year and to continue a very revered grudge match.

Naturally the games themselves are focal points for ritual and often real violence. Mr. Pretzel Bender, who played in ASU’s marching band for all five years of his engineering major (!!), told me that both ASU and U of Arizona have alternative insulting lyrics to each other’s fight songs. Fight songs, for the uninitiated, are simply pep songs sung (well, mostly played) at school sporting events. Most American high schools and universities have them.

You can listen to ASU’s real fight song here and U of Arizona’s here.

Incidentally, there is a website that has a list of PAC-10 alternative insulting fight song lyrics but I am reluctant to post it here because they cover the gamut of sexist, homophobic (heavily so), and racist epithets and I think I have enough incriminating things on this blog already. Search for it on your own if you’re curious (and you should be).

From the sample of the alternative lyrics site (which was accurate for the ASU and U of Arizona songs, I can’t vouch for the others), I found that a surprising number of the insulting alternative lyrics included gratuitous insults to the team’s marching band alongside the usual questioning of the sports team’s sexuality (which, interestingly, has similarities with the allusions within the Coyolxauhqui stone itself, but I will get to that later).

As an aside, that finding led me to ponder that perhaps it was the marching band members from rival schools that had a hand in writing the alternative lyrics to fight songs. Judging from their tone, the rest were probably written by fraternities. Mr. Pretzel Bender did not find that idea surprising noting that, “the band is probably the only group on campus that actually knows the words to their own fight songs, much less other teams”.

But we’d better head back to my original point about the playbook of violent civil rivalries.

I recall one year in which I was watching the end of the ASU/UA game on a local TV channel (to see the marching band, I try to avoid actually watching the game) and saw that the U of Arizona team had gone to the side of the field where the ASU mascot/insignia was painted and were collectively jumping up and down on it while singing the alternative lyrics to the ASU fight song.

Such gross provocation did not go unnoticed and before long ASU players (and I believe, the luckless Sparky [ASU’s mascot, the “sun devil”] for that game) were drawn into the melee. I thought it was the most entertaining thing I’d seen in a while. Certainly it was lot more entertaining than mere football.

Clearly, elaborate taunts gleaned from a shared historical narrative and insider knowledge often culminating in violence are an integral part of Arizona’s own civil war games. Mr. Pretzel Bender said that the year that ASU went to the Rose Bowl (and of course, one of the years ASU beat UA in the joint games) the UA/ASU game was particularly vicious with fans and players alike getting thrown out for fighting. He said that few of the original players ended up on the field by the end, most of the regulars having gotten thrown out.

The ASU/UA ritualized and occasionally violent civil rivalry echoes a recent and fascinating interpretation by the ASU art historian Emily Umberger that puts the Coyolxauhqui stone (among other monuments) into the context of the violent civil conflicts and elaborate insulting rituals by the rival warriors of competing centers within the core of the Aztec empire. The rival political groups engaged in taunting rituals by placing each other in the humiliated and defeated position in religious narratives.

Umberger argues that the Coyolxauhqui stone was created around one of these civil conflicts, the one between the Tenochca of Tenochtitlan and the Tlatelolca of Tlateloclo in which the Tenochca won. The stone depicts a dismembered woman dressed in man’s clothing. She’s dressed in man’s clothing because “she” may well have been male, and only turned into a physical woman by defeat. The Coyolxauhqui “goddess” represents an enemy who was overthrown and killed by righteous deities at the end of the mythical narrative. This is not unlike some of the more unfortunate fight song lyrics emphasizing the “femininity” of rival male sports teammates. In fact, I have to concede that the lyrics are more properly understood as men insulting each other by comparing each other to women (rather than simply anti-homosexual).

As a woman I admit to finding that irritating.

But I have to concede it is pervasive and, apparently, crosscuts cultures and time periods! It must be a jock/warrior thing.

If you’re interested, you can read the original article by the art historian Emily Umberger, called, “The Metaphorical Underpinnings of Aztec History: the case of the 1473 civil war” published in the latest edition of the journal Ancient Mesoamerica (a subscription is required, but if you have access to an online university library catalog, most of them have subscriptions).

Of course, there’s more to it than just the actual ritualized taunting by itself. Rulers commonly construct monuments to memorialize certain key events in their reign such as conquests. In Rome, conquest of enemy territory were celebrated by a triumph (a parade through Rome by the conquering troops and their general and/or the emperor) and often culminated in the ritual killing (read, sacrifice) of a renowned enemy combatant, as in the case of Vercingetorix, renowned Gaul rebel leader who was “executed” at the temple of Jupiter (though some have argued he may simply have been killed in prison following the triumph). In addition, it was Roman practice to install local ‘conquered’ gods within the main temples of the major Roman gods in addition to the installation of the imperial cult in provincial temples and was one of the cited causes for the first Jewish Roman wars that culminated in the sack of Jerusalem (and the famous destruction of the Temple) as described by Josephus’s account. Supposedly the Aztecs had their own “temple of conquered gods” as well, but we’ve yet to find it.

But all of this talk about the significance of the monument is distracting from the original purpose, which was to build a monument cake. Although in retrospect, perhaps one commemorating enemy defeat isn’t exactly the right sort of thing for a “going away” cake. But it is what he wanted!

CG also wanted a white cake with vanilla buttercream icing. Due to the extreme heat we’re experiencing at the moment, I opted to make the powdered sugar version rather than the sugar syrup version because the latter is not very heat resistant. The cake shape itself would be very easy, just a plain old 9 inch diameter round double layer cake. I’ve made hundreds of these.

So much for the easy part.

The hard part was in executing the design of this cake. I toyed with the idea of using my new cake printer to simply print out the design and slapping it on top of the cake. This didn’t end up appealing to me because the original monument incorporates so many different textures and dimensions in its relief sculpting, that it really wouldn’t do it justice. Compromises have to be made in two dimensional drawings out of necessity, so artists have to employ their own visual interpretations and conventions to convey an understanding of the 3d aspects of the monument. I didn’t want to do my own drawing on a cake since I had an opportunity to do a 3d version just like the real thing!

I ended up compromising.

I used a drawing of the Coyolxauhqui stone by Emily Umberger as my template for creating a relief sculpture of my own using fondant. The fondant relief allowed me to use a combination of “thick” 2d representations in some places and appliqué of 3d elements like the snake headed ropes that cover every limb of the goddess.

I rolled out fondant sheets and used an exacto knife to cut out the basic pieces.

Next I added the sculpted appliqué to the pieces and used another sculpting tool culled from my collection of gum paste plastic tools to basically incise some of the designs into the fondant.

Some of the appliqué turned out to be technically difficult. For example, the snake headed ropes were not easy to make into real knots. Partly because I know little about knot topology but also partly because I suspect some of them are not “real” or possible physical knots.

Anyway, when I had completed them all I assembled them on the cake top.

Here’s a pic of the original Aztec monument below.

And here’s my cake version. I ended up getting a few pics with alternative lighting schemes (compliments of a resident artifact photographer fellow student) so you can get an idea of some of the reliefs.

Here's the version showing more relief:

And here's one with a little more light and less relief:

It tasted okay and no one was ritually humiliated by either its display or creation.

Perhaps next time.

Art Deco and Paisley Wedding Cake

2007-07-08T20:36:00.000-07:00

All wedding cakes, particularly the bride’s cake, are collaborative design efforts. I’ve only done them as gifts and most folks have at least some ideas about how they want this particular piece of their wedding ceremony to look and taste. At least, my friends and relations who wanted wedding cakes did! This is the story of the latest effort, an Art Deco and Paisley wedding cake undertaken for friend G.

The bride’s cake, as I’ve said in previous texts, is the fancy decorated cake that is featured in most weddings as part of the whole cake-cutting and mutual eating ritual undertaken by the bride and groom in front of the reception guests. Traditionally, these used to be “white” cakes in the U.S.

White cakes are simple butter cakes that are made with only egg whites, which give them an white/off white color and soft texture. Of course, now people pick pretty much any flavor they want although some folks still insist on having white icing. The availability of titanium dioxide whitening products (bleach is not just for clothes and teeth anymore!) allows one to use real butter and vanilla and still get that extra virgin white for one’s buttercream frosting.

I’m a fan because I hate the mouth-feel of all shortening frosting. Additionally, clear vanilla is also obviously artificial vanillin rather than “real” vanilla. Taste tests of real vanilla versus fake vanilla undertaken by the relentless experimenters at Cook's Illustrated decided that in most baked goods, even their super tasters couldn’t really tell the difference between the two.

Despite this, I am superstitious enough to prefer real vanilla.

Actually, my favorite vanilla is a Mexican vanilla from Veracruz produced by Gaya (the same folks who produce the wonderful Xanath, the vanilla liqueur that is probably the only alcoholic drink [besides absinthe] that fascinates me and [unlike absinthe] I would actually drink neat). I visited the factory once in Gutierrez Zamora (or perhaps it was just a branch) and got a whole liter of the stuff to take home at great expense. It seems lighter in color and stronger smelling than ordinary vanilla.

I do note that most of the bride’s cakes or main wedding cakes that I’ve made have been white or yellow cake. About half and half, come to think of it! My most recent wedding cake included both yellow and chocolate layers. This was per the request of the bride and I think it’s a great idea. The more flavors the better. She had the top two tiers as golden buttercream (rich yellow cake) and sour cream chocolate fudge as the bottom tier with vanilla and chocolate frosting.

One chocolate frosting I particularly like is the confectioner’s sugar version included on the back of the Hershey’s cocoa box (which they include in order to better the sales of their cocoa!). This is the one I used for G’s bottom tier filling for her chocolate layer. It’s not as pure chocolate as a ganache (which is just cream and chocolate) but it is a lot more stable at room temperature so it is preferable for an Arizona summer wedding!

The bride also had some firm ideas about cake structure. She liked the idea of having a three tiered number without pillars but stacked directly atop each other. I’ve never actually done this particular tier architecture, but it’s one that I’ve always wanted to try so I was game. It’s pretty simple. You just have to stack the tiers directly on top of one another, with the only stipulation being that they require the internal straw support to hold up the weight of the cake. The proportions of the cakes seem to be more of a matter of taste and I’ve pretty much followed the 6inch, 9inch, and 12inch combo as a guideline for stacked tiers.

Friend G also had some ideas about the general design elements that she wanted in her cake. She wanted black and white colors and also paisley, with some dashes of bright colors here and there. We came up with a variation of an art deco theme with the paisley thrown in for good measure in the requisite colors.

Actually, I’d done an “art deco” cake for G years ago, for her birthday bash. Art deco is a design movement from the 1920s (roughly) to somewhere in the 1930s and 1940s. I don’t know that much about it, though I do recognize the visual style, but I do know that one influence is supposed to be culled from New Kingdom Egyptian designs because of the splashy discovery of King Tut’s tomb by Howard Carter circa the early 1920s.

The New Kingdom is known as an imperial period of Egyptian history complete with flamboyant rulers, a famous correspondence with client states (the Amarna letters), and distinctive brightly colored stylized art (some have suggested to me that it is “tackier” than the Old Kingdom visual style, which may explain why I found it very cool at about age 9, which is the first and last time I attempted any kind of writing on the subject).

At any rate, the salient point is that a celebrated archaeological discovery basically led to the interior elevator doors of the Chrysler Building being decorated with stylized lotuses borrowed from the visual stylings of a very old empire in another part of the world.

It’s kind of striking, isn’t it?

So I borrowed the lotus schematic (a bit more chunky than theirs, admittedly) to make this design for her original art deco birthday cake. I used the same design, except in black and white combined with white beads for the top and bottom tiers of her wedding cake. Here's the cheesy schematic I used.

The paisleys were in reserve for the second tier that would provide some eye-catching variation from the more stylized and dramatic top and bottom layers. However, the paisleys proved to be more problematic.

For one thing, paisleys are extremely detailed. Two paisley design books and countless web design sites later, we really hadn’t found anything that was do-able using any kind of medium that I had in mind.

Truthfully, I lack the technical skills to create elaborate icing paisleys and certainly not in the patterns that were illustrated. In fact, the only reason I even considered fabric patterns at all is the recent purchase (as a birthday present from Mr. Pretzel Bender) of a cake printer.

A cake printer, for the uninitiated, is just a regular inkjet printer that has been refitted to handle edible ink cartridges that can be used to print out images onto frosting sheets. The frosting sheets are basically sugar paper (well, they are a little thicker than paper) that are entirely edible.

This paper-like substance is printed on with edible ink and the finished sheet is then placed on icing that hasn’t yet formed its sugar crust (basically, most confectioner’s sugar based frosting forms a sugar crust upon sitting out within a few minutes, it’s some kind of chemical process obviously). So the frosting has to be “fresh” and then hypothetically the sheet will not only adhere to the frosting surface, but it will also appear to melt into the frosting surface.

Most commercial cake printings that I’ve seen are “photo cakes”. Basically people bring in a photo or digital file to a cake shop (often a grocery bakery) and get their kid, puppy, spouse, whatever juxtaposed onto a cake surface for whatever the occasion demands. Although I understand the personalization that comes with having you and your nearest and dearest’s image plastered onto a cake, I can’t help but find it kind of gauche unless it’s done humorously!

Personally, I am more interested in using cake printing to help create the cake decorations themselves, not simply paste photos onto cakes. In other words, instead of turning cakes into edible picture frames, I would rather turn the images into cake decorations! Fabric designs, embroider patterns, and of course ceramic designs are all the kinds of things I imagined being able to print out and use as part of a cake decoration paradigm that utilized printing.

Also, I had envisioned cake printing used in addition to other things so that icing embellishments would help keep things multi-dimensional on the cake surface. That was how I planned using printed paisley patterns on G’s wedding cake.

So G and I went through digital paisley designs and several books worth before she finally found one that had a black and white schematic underneath the bright colors of the pattern. The black and white was in keeping with the rest of the cake and also in keeping with her dress, a swatch of which is seen below!

We’d already decided to use rolled fondant to cover over the tiered layers. Rolled fondant when put over a tastier icing like buttercream is mostly non-offensive to me though it is a bit like eating very sweet vanilla flavored soft candy. I found a good locally produced fondant that comes in 10 pound buckets. Yes, buckets. It also comes in “virgin white”. And no, I will never get tired of repeating that phrase. However, the use of fondant as the outer covering required some experimentation in the application of frosting sheets, as I will explain below.

I ended up printing up the chosen wallpaper and plate patterns G had picked on about 5 frosting sheets. My idea was to cut out the design elements (various paisleys and flowers) and decoupage them onto the fondant. But what would be the best substance with which to glue them? I read on some internet sites that folks had used water to moisten the back of the frosting sheets (or the fondant surface) and had managed to get their frosting sheets to stick onto the surface though of course they never really melt into the surface like they do on wet buttercream frosting.

I experimented by using water to adhere frosting sheets onto fondant for a cake as a test run a few weeks before the wedding and found that water causes the colors on the frosting sheet to bleed after a few hours. Not good.

I thought about alternative sticky but edible substances and settled on trying out corn syrup (which has to have a pretty high sticky factor among edible and sweet substances). Mr. Pretzel Bender pondered whether the fondant and frosting sheets would be fat soluble. I didn't know but it gave me an idea!

I settled on using a simple experimental protocol to see which substance would work better. Using three test paisleys I stuck them onto a sheet of fondant using melted butter, water, and corn syrup, respectively. Immediately the water one began to bleed.

I then covered the sheet in plastic wrap to see what would happen the next day. Well, unfortunately, I can’t show you the second day test because the water and corn syrup ones were so sticky and broken down at that point that they stuck to the plastic wrap and came off in icky smears.

On the plus side it did answer my question about what substance would be best for sticking the frosting sheets to fondant! I obviously needed to use some kind of fat.

On the cake I ended up using trace amounts of vegetable fat because butter goes rancid when left out. The patterns didn’t melt but they adhered okay and if they remained sugar paper-like when the cake was being cut, I figured that was better than having the colors bleed and the pattern melting and sticking to everything and everyone!

To finish the paisley layer I used royal icing that had been dyed black to put the finishing touches including accents on the paisleys and flowers seen up close here.

Royal icing is a combination of confectioner’s sugar, meringue powder, and small amounts of water that is a form of sugar cement. It hardens to almost rock-like proportions.

Finally, for the top of the uppermost tier I put on an art deco lily pattern that G had picked. Originally I was going to put this pattern on by using a frosting sheet. However, I decided that royal icing would be better. It would stand out and look a little more interesting that just a flat printed surface and besides, the white of the frosting sheets didn’t quite manage to match the “virgin white” of the fondant.

To put the pattern on the cake top I used a variation of a method for creating Frescoes that I had read about in a children’s book on art called “Great Painters” that described how the artists first prepared the lime surface and then used paper with their painting design on it to transfer it to the fresco surface. The process is this: the pattern paper has dots/slits where the design is located and the artist transfers the pattern via a light water based paint or carbon dust by tracing over the pattern paper while it is attached to the fresco surface. It’s really a kind of underdrawing.

I traced the printed out pattern onto tracing paper, then I used an exacto knife to cut slits along the pattern. Next I put the pattern sheet on top of the fondant covered top tier and used an edible pen tip to push the pattern through very faintly on the cake. Finally, I applied (somewhat ineptly, I’m still not that great at piping royal icing steadily, it requires a surprising amount of pressure) the art deco lily design onto the cake top in royal icing!

Here’s the final finished product. I think it’s one of my favorites. I’m not sure what part was more fun, the artistic collaboration aspect or that it was part of a wedding ceremony of good friends!

And we all got to eat it too.

Dalek Cake

2007-06-22T00:45:00.000-07:00

All the weddings I attended as a child had two cakes. One, the bride’s cake, was white and covered in all manner of scrolls and scallops. The other, the groom’s cake, was a more whimsical and less serious number. It often featured a hobby or special interest of the groom, such as fishing or golfing. The groom’s cake was also invariably chocolate, another tradition.

I’ve read books that stated that back when the bride’s cake used to be made of fruitcake, it was intended to be sliced up and sent home as a party favor (and eaten for months) rather than at the party itself. Therefore, groom’s cakes were required for the wedding feast and intended to be eaten on site. I can’t tell you why they were chocolate.

Now, the bride’s cakes have morphed into plain vanilla (I concede that any flavor is now acceptable) and are served along with the extraneous groom’s cake. Personally, when I first pondered the question of why there were two cakes at weddings, it seemed to be inherently obvious to a child that one would want both chocolate and vanilla cake options whenever possible!

However, the bride’s cake is still the one that gets all the fuss made over it with the official cutting and feeding of the cake to each other by the bride and groom.

Honestly, I don’t know that a groom’s cake is a tradition in all parts of the US, but I do know that in the Deep South, where I am from, it is firmly established. At least, I’ve never been to a wedding in Louisiana that didn’t feature a groom’s cake!

I’ve helped make a few wedding cakes in my time (mine, my sister’s, my uncle’s, and two sets of friend couples) and they’ve all included a groom’s cake. So I suppose I should say that I have enforced the tradition in my own experience.

Most of them have been a simple chocolate number. I’ve made a giant square of rich chocolate cake covered in chocolate icing and bearing a few simple decorations (I’ve stuck to roses mostly) as embellishments.
Here's one that I made for Mr. Pretzel Bender at our wedding.

Notice that in this one for friend A, I ventured into more adventurous territory with the inclusion of a gum paste cicada (brood X was marauding their way through the East Coast at the time). Yes, they really do have red eyes! I believe he kept the bug.

The latest groom’s cake I attempted was different in several dramatic ways. It wasn’t chocolate, it wasn’t square, and it moved (well, rather slowly, the cake was awfully heavy) by its wireless remote controlled platform.

Friend J (or T to his family) wanted a cake in the shape of a Dalek. A Dalek, for the uninitiated, is a race of mutant creatures featured as one of the many (and probably most implacable) foes of Doctor Who, of the eponymous British sci fi series.

Actually, he originally wanted a Dalek in scuba gear so I think I got off lightly with just the Dalek!

From my observations of the cake decorating industry from the vantage point of a hobbyist, one significant “type” of cake decorating involves making cakes that are exact replicas (in miniature) of objects that can vary from anything from incredibly elaborate buildings to computers. Although I’ve admired the artistry and technical precision of many of these “cakes as objects” as well as their inventive use of the sugar medium, I have not typically practiced it in my own cake decorating.

This is not to say that I haven’t made replica flowers, insects, and pearls in sugar as decorative cake accoutrements, but I haven’t actually made the cakes as anything other than cakes with decoration.

On occasion, I’ve tried to articulate a theory of cake decorating that describes respecting the form and cake medium (conic sections mostly I guess) using different artistic themes (like art deco) or ceramic traditions (like Blue Delft) to decorate cakes. Partly this is out of personal preference. I prefer keeping the cake “forms” as cakes, not as jeeps or space ships unless it’s funny (like an alien autopsy). Partly I think it may also be that although I like to think I have some minor skill in the sugar arts, I am not much of a technician and making replicas is an exacting art!

But there was no getting out of it this time. And Daleks have so many unforgivably straight sides! What to do?

Well, first there was the matter of the cake. J said he wasn’t fond of most cake (not being a sweet tooth like myself) but chose a banana cake for sentimental reasons. I decided to use a nice banana cake recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible. It’s got a nice hint of lemon because the recipe calls for lemon zest. The cake is also a little sturdier than a standard butter cake and because of the starch from the banana is also a little more resilient and springy in texture.

Still, I was a little worried about creating the Dalek cake archictecture (I figured the finished product would be about a foot and half high) and making the cake solid enough to hold itself together without stressing the fondant covering.

My solution was to try making a variation of a Chilean cake, the “torta de mil ojas” or “thousand layers cake”. The original torta is made creating very thin sponge-like crepe/cakes (that incidentally also have lemon zest) in as many layers as possible (the most I’ve managed is 18) thinly spread with manjar blanco, literally, “white jam” also known as “dulce de leche”, which is a rich milk caramel.

One experiment later, and I found that each banana cake layer could be easily sliced into three layers for spreading the caramel and it also tasted pretty good. It’s kind of like a “bananas foster” cake (bananas foster is a New Orleans dessert – as an aside, my love of bananas is unsurprising given that New Orleans was [or at least was at one time] a major port of entry for bananas into the US, so banana desserts, like the wonderful banana pudding made with nilla wafers from my childhood are ubiquitous there).

Also, the banana/caramel idea allowed me to create a cake that was VERY solid, with an incredibly sticky substrate, and thin enough layers to allow for contouring the upper part of the Dalek.

You can see the bottom half here. It was also relatively easy to cut the layers of banana cake and caramel into an outline of the basic Dalek shape.

I ended up making two significant cake segments, each nine layers tall, one for the bottom half and the other for the Dalek “head” and middle section. I covered them up in fondant and then painted them using luster dust in the appropriate bronze and old gold colors using vodka to get them to adhere (the alcohol evaporates so it doesn’t affect the fondant).

Sculpting the fondant into a Dalek-like exterior proved a bit daunting. I can’t say I achieved much in the way of clean lines, but the whole was certainly suggestive in colors, shapes, and details of a Dalek.

Getting the fondant to stick (in the grill on the “head” for example) actually required the use of a little corn syrup. Still, at least I found that using an exacto knife to cut lines into the fondant to give the impression of metal joints and indentations proved fairly successful.

Also, I ended up having to cut open a zillion (something around 74) little holes into the fondant sides to implant the fondant gold balls successfully and without using tons of toothpicks which would have made cutting (and eating) the cake a challenge.

I only ended up having to use non food items in three places. One, was in using the miniature metal whisk for the suspiciously whisk like “death ray” left arm of the Dalek. I also used flexible plastic straws covered in fondant to create the toilet plunger-like arm and the head “nose”. And yeah, I did use two toothpicks to stick the silver fondant “eyes” into the Dalek head.

I had to use straws through the center of both sections to add to their structural integrity and put the top half of the cake on its own cardboard round (forgetting that I would need to attach it to the other cake somehow!). I ended up performing an operation on the top half to insert straws through the cardboard round so the top could REALLY be stuck to the bottom well.

I placed it on a cake cooling rack (basically an open metal grid) that was balanced between two chair backs and went in underneath and cut tiny holes into the cardboard round so I could shove straws into the Dalek top partway, leaving the bottom half of the straws sticking out so they could go into the bottom section of the cake.

And yes, it was just as precarious and silly as the diagram below indicates. One does not necessarily make the best engineering decisions late at night. Suffice to say the cake survived the operation unscathed.

Speaking of engineering…

Now we get to what was, in my opinion, the pièce de résistance of the whole cake. The remote controlled moving platform that was specially built for the Dalek cake by two engineers who coincidentally also served as mentors of a local HS Robotics First Team, Mr. Pretzel Bender and his buddy M.

Here they are, pictured in very similar and unprompted poses at the same event. Mr. Pretzel Bender is the one on the left. M is on the right.

Clearly, their minds are in synch.

Perfect for designing and building a moving cake platform!

Step one was to buy a cheap remote control car and strip it to its bare engine and wheels body. Next they embedded it in a specially designed wooden case to build the platform around as you can see below.

Finally, the base itself was constructed with all the correct angles to suggest a Dalek using items I recall from high school (like a protractor, to get the angles right) and such exotic items (to me) as a Brad Nailer all of which helped make the outside shell look professional! The top was made of pine wood too.

It took them about two nights after work (including some down time for bb games and eating) to complete the job.

Mr. Pretzel Bender painted it a nice textured black. You can see it best in the following cake picture showing the Dalek cake “in situ” at the wedding itself.

Unfortunately, no one had any video to capture the cake actually moving via wireless remote control. However, given how slow it was initially (till some of the cake was eaten!) due to the extreme heaviness of the cake (caramel is heavy stuff) it probably is just as well.

With a much lighter butter cake it would have been positively zippy!

And now that I have exclusive access to a team of crack cake platform engineers, it occurs to me that there are a lot of humorous and hitherto unexplored possibilities for wireless remote controlled moving cake platforms, don't you think?

I look forward to trying them out.

A Paean to Purple Cake

2007-06-19T23:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve only made three graduation cakes and I suppose they are kind of in-between major projects like wedding cakes and more minor projects like birthday cakes. Typically graduation cakes are requested (well, I don’t suppose I can use the word “typically” since I have hardly any cases from which to generalize) but I think it would be kind of weird to show up at someone’s big graduation bash with a giant decorated cake without having had them ask you for it first.

Well, maybe if it was humorously shaped exactly like their head for the sake of some serious post-defense mordant wit!

My most recent graduation cake was for a friend, D (the same one who got me the UFO cake gig), who was celebrating her graduation from ASU’s Museum studies MA program. D, in addition to her Museum gigs, has worked at some of the same places I have as an archaeologist.

I asked her what she wanted on it, since it was an encomium in her honor, and she requested that it be the color purple and possibly embellished with some kind of flower. She was unspecific as to details but I surmised that she wanted something “girlie”.

D and I have both worked as field archaeologists. Actually, I believe she has way more contract field archaeology experience than I do. This means hard outdoor work, (well, pretty much anything outdoors in an Arizona summer should be considered hard labor by any standards!) complete with work boots and hard hats.

I see no inherent contradiction in D’s desire for girlie purple cake and her street credibility as a field archaeologist.

However, this may come as a surprise to people who assume that field archaeologists adopt the outdoor accoutrements (including boots, jeans, cotton work shirts, etc.) as affectations designed to enhance their credibility.

Of course it is also true that many vocations have clothing aesthetics (as one relation acerbically put it, when attending a Society for American Archaeology Meeting, “Do they ALL have to wear jeans and flannel shirts?”) and archaeologists are no exceptions, dressing the part even in situations where it is not required.

Naturally I thought D’s cake should involve the appropriate amount of glitter, flowers, ribbons, and purple. In this instance, I thought I would start by modeling gum paste flowers.

There are pretty standard instructions on how to model gum paste flowers and I’ve owned a kit that has the cut-out designs and cutters necessary for the job for years. For some reason, I’ve mostly stuck to sculpting basic flowers like roses “by hand” and avoiding all the others except when it comes to graduation cakes.

The first graduation cake flowers I ever did were daisies for a graduation cake years ago but they were relatively easy to do. They were labor intensive (they required royal icing applications for the flower centers and stems) but they were not technically hard to do with the flower petal cutters and some minor sculpting.

You can see a close up here.

And yeah, I know the icing is kind of messy. My excuse is that I was more concerned about the taste, and this happens to be my favorite custard-like icing to make, modeled after the famous “floating islands” dessert. Yes, this icing actually has crème anglaise and Italian meringue in it, oh, and about a pound of butter! But, I have to concede, the lack of smooth surfaced icing detracts from the appearance too much for my liking.

However, I do note that the design for this cake happens to be one of Mr. Pretzel Bender's favorites. Possibly the engineer in him simply likes the fact that I planned it in advance!

The second graduation cake I did for D's sister (requested by D) and it involved calla lilies. Again, a relatively easy flower.

For D, I wanted to finally attempt something really ambitious and unabashedly pretty. I wanted to try a flower that would require several cut-outs and some more elaborate assembly involving florist wires and tape. (I note here that gum paste flowers, while technically made of sugar paste and hence following the cake decorations must be edible rule, also typically include parts, like wire stamens, that are NOT edible).

Although the peanut gallery did opine it was a pity my orchids weren’t vibrant colored and speckled, the plain white orchid was the only kind in my flower instruction book!

Here they are.

You can see in the close-up the more detailed parts (three to be exact) of the three petals that had to be put together.

I used a plain vanilla sugar frosting (not too exciting but heat resistant, which is important where I live!) to decorate the 12 inch round two layer white cake.

Personally, I think that the day it is made, the white cake is probably the moistest and lightest of all of the butter cakes. It’s a favorite of mine when fresh. However, it is hard to use for big events unless I’ve really planned in advance though because it is best the day it is made.

I made this cake the day it was going to be served, mostly because I could do the flowers a few days in advance and keep the other decorations relatively simple.

Finally, the finished product, a glittery, pearl bedecked purple cake complete with beribboned gum paste orchids.

Personally, I think only the addition of some unicorns could have made this cake more girlie.

But, perhaps some sugar paper butterflies could have been thrown in for good measure! They can be disturbingly realistic.

Perhaps for the next graduation cake...

Unidentified Flying Cake

2007-05-07T00:42:00.000-07:00

Recently I was asked by a friend and co-worker, D, to do a cake for the opening of the exhibit, Alien Images: UFOs, Photography and Belief, at the ASU Museum of Anthropology. My original idea was to do something subtle, something artistic, perhaps even sublime!

Okay it was just an alien autopsy.

I wanted to do a cake (red velvet, naturally) that was in the form of a big-headed grey/cream colored alien body that could be cut humorously with a big meat cleaver.

Yes, I’m aware that it’s not all that original. And that’s even if I hadn’t seen the wonderful 80s (I think) Alice in Wonderland video by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers which they end by eating a “live” Alice cake (that appears to be red velvet, incidentally).

Actually, I can trace the genesis of my alien autopsy or food as cake body quite clearly. I got the idea from a food study break in college. In the now late (and unlamented) Woodward Court dormitory at the University of Chicago, each two floor “house” was given a weekly allowance to buy food for a study break. A few people from the house were assigned to purchase the ingredients to make food or buy prepared food for the break. Since this is food preparation and/or purchasing for a public event (the study break was open to the entire house) it naturally became a venue for competition and display!

A couple of guys and one girl basically set the bar high with their study break. They made a life-size dummy out of paper-mache, filled it with candy (and I believe condoms, which violated the food edict, but why not) and dressed it in a business suit and hung it in the middle of the lounge for the study break. Their concept was to have students beat the dummy with baseball bats (which they provided, of course) to get the candy.

It was an inspiring sight.

Of course, it turned out they’d made the dummy head (complete with hat) too hard to really break easily, so I have a vivid memory of one student jumping up and down on the head to get it to spill the goods.

One of the planners told me that originally they’d wanted to do a cake “body” but that the lure of a paper-mache businessman was greater.

I didn’t do the alien autopsy.

The curator of the exhibit liked the idea, but one of the planners preferred the idea of getting a cake in the shape of a UFO or flying saucer. Since the exhibit featured a lot of fifties style flying saucers, I figured that’s the shape I should be going for in the cake. And since it was commissioned (and paid for) after all, I didn’t really have the final artistic license.

So, how to do a fifties flying saucer cake? First off, I wanted something very simple and structurally sound. Since flying saucer molds weren’t proving that easy to come by, I had to settle on making the base out of a large round pan (or conic section if you want to get technical) and the top part out of some kind of hemispherical pan. I found a soccer ball half mold that seemed like it would do the trick.

The soccer ball pan was made out of nice light aluminum by Wilton cake pans. Unfortunately, the instructions on how to bake a cake in the pan were vague. They should (in my opinion) give you cups of batter (as a guideline) and then tell you how much time you will need to fully bake your cake. The instructions simply said that the pan would fit “one cake mix”, i.e., a two layer 9 inch round cake batter would fit nicely. No word on how long or what temperature to bake the cake!

I ended up using a recipe for a golden buttercream cake from Berenbaum’s Cake Bible that I’ve mentioned before. It’s a sturdy cake with a pound cake-like crust, a wonderful flavor, and can hold up to structures like layers and, I hoped, a half hemisphere upper portion of a spaceship!

So I ended up having to bake it for a full hour and a half at 350 degrees Fahrenheit (a safe temp to guess as most butter cakes bake around that temp) to cook it through entirely. I proved fortunate in my choice of cake because had I chosen one of the lighter butter cakes, I think the cake crust would have burned quite badly. As it was, it was a very dark brown in places by the time the center of it was testing as "done".

Since the cake is like a pound cake in retaining moisture, I knew from past experience that I could safely shave off the hard top part of the crust and be okay. So I let the cake cool for a while sitting dome-like on the cake cooling rack.

And then I made a fatal error.

I momentarily forgot the structural properties of hemispheres and turned the cake round side down. As the following diagram generally demonstrates, there are certain forces pulling on the sides of a hemisphere precariously balanced on it's rounded side.

The cake tore itself apart in about two seconds.

The unhappy results are below.

I had to bake an entirely new cake. On the up side, the second one cooked up a lot better and the cake was less in need of a trim. And I was able to put the cake together after only 2 hours of detour!

I finally put it together and with the help of friend K, we used my husband’s nice vodka to paint the rolled fondant covering with silver luster dust. We ended up with a look of brushed sheet metal.

Finally, with some design suggestions from Mr. Pretzel Bender, I added some doors and round-ish windows complete with silver edible non-pareils (the ones that look like ball bearings) for the finishing touch.

Here it is below at the exhibit opening.

And finally, the best part. The cake stratigraphy. Note the straws? I learned my lesson from previous experience that one needs to use the tensile strength to hold up second heavy layers!

In Memory of New Orleans, part II, Mardi Gras

2007-02-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

I didn’t grow up in New Orleans although I was born there and lived the first two years of my life (more or less) on S. Saratoga Street sort of near the Garden District. I grew up to the north of Lake Pontchartrain, in a small paper mill town of about ten thousand located on the Pearl River (the border of Louisiana and Mississippi) right at the upper tip of the “boot” (Louisiana is boot-shaped). Therefore, although I recall Mardi Gras celebrations from New Orleans proper, this is more of a reminiscence of the general area than the big city.

Mardi Gras, also known as Fat Tuesday, is the final celebration before Ash Wednesday, or the beginning of the Catholic season of Lent, which is basically a preparation for Holy Week, or the religious celebrations surrounding Easter. Although Mardi Gras is really a Catholic Church deal, it is celebrated widely by all denominations in southeastern Louisiana. At any rate, Carnivale is something that is more typically celebrated by the Catholic countries with some occasional join-ins by the local Christian denominations. Mardi Gras is officially a holiday in Louisiana (or it was when I was growing up there) and often we’d get the Monday off beforehand as well.

The history of Mardi Gras in Louisiana really begins with the founding of Louisiana itself, by the French adventurers and explorer brothers Le Moyne, Iberville and Bienville, respectively. My eighth grade history teacher, Coach Butler (I think he was a football coach, but I’m not sure) adopted the ancient technique of teaching Louisiana history by rote. He had us read and rewrite the book (to make sure we’d read it) paragraph by paragraph. It was crude but mostly effective.

Coach Butler had us memorize “facts” which he then helpfully synthesized for us in class. He had a pungent way of speaking. “Founded by crooks, run by crooks, financed by crooks, and finally run by crooks again!”…and he wasn’t wrong. He also had the novel idea of teaching us something useful. So in addition to learning Louisiana’s major crops (cotton, soybeans, sugarcane, rice) and exports (oil) we also learned how to do our taxes. He had us do the basic tax forms for if we were married, single, with and without dependents. That and balancing checkbooks (3rd grade I think) were the only very practical things I recall learning pre-high school!

From my hazy understanding of colonizing in the Americas, there were two sorts of people that had a hand in these imperial ventures, the financiers and the diplomat generals. Iberville and his brother Bienville fit into the latter category. Iberville was the older brother and had been an agent pursuing French interest in Canada before ever ending up in Louisiana (which was named by the French explorer de la Salle) and founding a bunch of towns. The colony was a bit of disaster and had trouble maintaining its meager population due to disease.

The first major financier of mention for Louisiana was a man named Antoine Crozat, who was granted the royal monopoly by the French crown to exploit and extract precious metals which he hoped to find near Mexico (Coach Butler pronounced his name AntWINE). That didn’t work out. Then there was an interlude with the financier and salesman John Law from the Company of the West, who basically financed Louisiana. This didn’t work out either (eventually, he went bankrupt) and later the French government used the colony as a dumping ground and sent over criminals, indentured servants, and “200 women of questionable virtue” to add to the population.

It was never clear to me what, exactly, these men had wanted out of Louisiana to begin with since it didn’t have the fur trade of the north, the watery coastal areas were prone to disastrous flooding, and many of the major cash crops at the time like cotton and sugar cane were not easily grown there (not till modern drainage methods and farming).

Louisiana’s purpose evolved into simply being a strategic marker in the geopolitical gamesmanship of France and Britain.

Now it’s successful only as a tourist trap. So it goes.

Bienville himself eventually became the governor of Louisiana and founded the city of New Orleans in the crescent turn of the Mississippi River (hence New Orleans’s original nickname, “the Crescent City”). Bienville and his brother are credited with bringing Catholic traditions, including the Lenten festival of Mardi Gras to Louisiana.

Here he is in this picture:

The private New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrations are the balls and parties of the Mardi Gras Krewes. The Krewes are basically social clubs, often with other philanthropic causes and purposes. The Krewes themselves were and probably still are typically made up of the rich and ruling elite of New Orleans and even, I might hazard a guess, of my own humble hometown. I think the original New Orleans krewes like Rex (one of the oldest) or Comus date to the 19th century at least (and possibly echo earlier Mardi Gras traditions). They were supposedly based on the practices of the French Court and although this is possible, I think they could only have been some kind of parody. From what I recall, the Krewes elect monarchs (typically a king and queen) from their number and hold a series of parties and balls in which the Krewes “hold court” and some of the bigger and older ones, like Comus and Rex, actually have a joint courtly invitation or something like that with each other. Pomp and circumstance combined with masked balls, very elaborate costumes, and probably a fair amount of drinking. Although I can’t honestly say whether the private balls of the Krewes are anything like the drink-soaked crowds of tourists out on the street.

At any rate, membership in the Krewes for some of the older ones like Comus and Rex used to be restricted by family relations, and I suppose, the traditional “elite” connections. Others appear to be restricted by sex or other specific qualifications. For example the Krewe of Isis was all female while the Krewe of Sparta was all male. There was some controversy over club restrictions at one point about ten years ago, but I believe since that since the Krewes are private clubs, the federal courts allowed it and the Supreme Court hasn’t accepted a case against them. I always thought the Zulu Krewe was the coolest, but I think it was because they handed out gold painted coconuts during their parade!

The public side of the Mardi Gras celebrations are the parades which are run, organized, and staffed by the Krewes. These parades are vehicle after vehicle of fantastically decorated floats, in all sorts of shapes and sizes inspired by pretty much anything and everything and staffed by the Krewes themselves in full regalia (which can be quite impressive). It’s a glittering spectacle and combined with handouts of trinkets such as doubloons (very shiny metallic fake money with the Krewe name and year), cups, beads (very colorful and some, to a childish eye, looking like real pearls), and other unique toys (I remember getting a rubber snake one year) the parades are something out of a child’s dream. One is supposed to stand on the sidelines and scream, “Hey throw me something mister” and then get pelted happily by the goods.

I wasn’t all that aware of the drinking or debauchery associated with Mardi Gras. I think if you’re a kid and you’re not interested, those things are more or less invisible to you. I do remember some older people annoying me once near a New Orleans parade because they smelled very bad (they were drunk).

And as a little aside, I think most outside interpretations of the “sugar beads” (or the really nice beads that are also part of the parade trinket repertoire) have gotten it all wrong. Current interpretations are that in order to obtain them, women are supposed to show off certain feminine body parts located in pairs within the torso region. As I child, I was always told (and not by folks who were trying to shelter me either) that the appropriate etiquette to obtain sugar beads was to kiss the person proffering them. That sounded okay to me then although in retrospect, perhaps showing body parts is less personal!

I still prefer the kissing idea. Perhaps because as a kid I always imagined they meant kissing on the cheek. It seemed friendly rather than crass.

My hometown had its own Mardi Gras parade with a total of two “Krewes” that I can recall. I think one was MCCA (not sure what that stands for) and I dimly remember one called “Sparta”. There are probably more of them now. My mother told me how they picked their respective monarchs. She said that the members got together and gave money bids for how much each was willing to spend on the parties. The person who gave the highest bid was elected ruler. I don’t know if that’s really how it worked, but it seemed like a very sensible idea to me at the time!

I’m sure that drinking did figure heavily in these local balls and parties but I can say with certainty that there was also cake. King Cake is a significant feature of the time leading up to Mardi Gras and is traditionally served at Mardi Gras parties. It’s a yeast “cake” much like a sweet roll often with raisins and/or cinnamon fillings. It fits into the bigger tradition of other Catholic countries’ “Twelfth Night cakes” or sweetbreads that are served on twelfth night (the 12th day of Christmas and January 6th or the Ephiphany). There’s a version of this cake in Mexico too.

King Cake is served beginning after 12th night and all the way up to Mardi Gras. From what I recall, folks would bring king cakes to classes every week (typically on Friday) and everyone would have a piece of the cake that was decorated with a sugar glaze frosting with dyed sugar in the three Mardi Gras colors of green, purple, and yellow. They all stand for something (I think) but I’ve forgotten what over the years.

In one piece was hidden “the baby”, literally a little tiny molded plastic naked baby, that you had to be careful not to crunch down on while munching cake. Whoever got “the baby” had to bring next week’s King Cake. Some traditions tie the receipt of the baby with becoming the “king” or “queen” of that particular party with obligations tied to providing next time’s feast. As a child I only fixated on the idea that if you got the baby, you had to bring cake next time. It seemed a worthy tradition and one I did not think I was leaving behind when I left.

Although people where I live now are aware of Mardi Gras, and even go out to celebrate it, it’s not really the same holiday I recall. I discovered that Mardi Gras elsewhere doesn’t come with all the pretty trinkets and cake!

From my childhood Mardi Gras treasure trove I have only one sugar bead left.

And it still looks like real pearls to me.

Let Them Eat Election Cake!

2007-02-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

I’ve only run for office once. It was for a class election in elementary school.

The only other time I’ve held office was for a student government position in grad school which I admit to finding faintly embarrassing. Since I was appointed and not elected, I like to think it shouldn’t count against me. Besides, I’ve always thought there are utterly powerless folks in a political system and then there are student governments vying for one step below that rung. I had a cause and a few friends in the org at the time.

I ran for fifth grade class president because I was required to run for an office; actually, the entire class was required to run for office. When the choices are president, vice-president, secretary of state, and treasurer, it’s pretty obvious that every kid is going to run for president. This was facilitated by the fact that the elections were held one at a time. So the first election was held for president, once that was decided, the vice-presidential elections, and so forth until all the offices were filled. In that context, pretty much everyone ran for every office till they were all filled.

Ostensibly, the exercise was part of our civics lesson in how U.S. national elections and the Electoral College work. In fact, I think it may have been imported from California. My sister and I had spent a brief four months living in Cupertino, California in fourth grade and our teacher, Ms. Nile (whose daily rendition of the song Waltzing Matilda I will never forget), had assigned each class member two states and held presidential elections. The Regnart Elementary School ‘s version was correct and instead of requiring us all to run for office, class members could field president and vice-presidential teams and then run more or less like the real thing. I believe a girl named Mardell won the presidency. She was nice, easy-going, and smart. I voted for her. Too bad real politics aren’t like that. Another girl, “M2” was a more typical candidate. I learned a lot from her. For example, it’s the first time I learned that there was an alternative meaning to the word “gay” that didn’t mean happy and carefree. M2 liked using the term a lot. Typically with people who weren’t voting for her (and that would have been the majority). Mrs. Roth and I troubled her by not thinking it was an insult, even with the secondary meaning attached. She also found “ya’ll” (a southernism for “you all”) inexplicably funny as well. We thought it was obviously superior to the whiny and nasal California phrase “you guys”.

Back we went to the vast metropolis of Bogalusa, Louisiana.

After moving back, my sis and I told our fifth grade teacher Mrs. Rawls, about the assignment. She must have liked it (or possibly already had a similar idea) because the next thing we knew, the entire fifth grade was having elections. Each class member was assigned two states. I forget which ones I got assigned at this point, but I do remember who had California! And instead of fielding teams, the fifth grade teachers made us all run. And they offered the full complement of offices with real duties attached. This wasn’t a bad strategy when you consider that there would be few stigmas to losing if EVERYONE was required to run for an office.

As an aside on a similar theme, I have pondered how elections would work if office-holders were selected by lottery, like jury duty. You would get slackers and people who “forgot” to open the envelope. But you might get a little less of the power-hungry smarminess. Perhaps some people would rise to the occasion. Or not.

Anyways, the salient point is that everyone ran for president, including me. We all had to give campaign speeches and then talk fellow classmates into voting for us. I remember preparing my speech in the backyard, while I walked around and around the vegetable garden and the rose bush. I spent a lot of time on it. And I’d already made sure that my campaign promises of obtaining water and bathroom passes were okay with the teacher. I thought it was pretty good. It was at least a handwritten page long. I took it to my grandfather (a southern Baptist minister) and read it aloud to him. He was very quiet. Then he said he liked it. He then proceeded to give me one of his rambling but potent speeches on the seductive and fickle nature of political power.

By way of background, Granddaddy once told me that he thought I could do anything, and he’s probably the only person who could say something like that and make it sound like a warning.

I told him we were required to run for office. That seemed to mollify him.

Of course, to be fair to him, I’ve always been fascinated by political power. I should say that I use that term loosely. For instance, I entertained the notion (very briefly at about age 9) of being a preacher because I liked the idea of having a lot of people listen to me. I admired that kind of influence. Granddaddy doubtless recognized this tendency and took care to warn me about the dangers of pride and ambition.

Years later, after my grandfather died, I discovered that the only Shakespeare he had in his considerable (for a modestly paid Southern preacher) library was a worn copy of Macbeth. It didn’t surprise me.

Back in the classroom, I remember everyone trooping up to the front of class and giving their election speeches. Some speeches were forced, with a lot of ums and ahs, others were jokes done in pure fun, and still others made wild promises like “no homework ever again!”. I remember going around the room and collecting votes along with everyone else. It was kind of odd really because everyone was running so you had to ask people to vote against themselves. Interestingly, very few people voted for themselves, probably because the voting was public. I think I voted for a girl named Angela. She voted for me.

We had a run-off between the two top presidential finalists, me and a boy named Donric.

I won.

At first I thought it was my great speech and I was proud.

Then I overheard one boy saying, “I voted for [Pretzel Bender] because she’s pretty."

Politics have never been the same for me after that.

Darn it, they were supposed to vote for me because I had real campaign promises and a good speech!

I wanted people to vote for me for reasons that I found compelling, but I discovered that elections don’t really work that way. You take whatever support you can get, and you don’t get too picky about the reasons people have for supporting you so long as they do. Only getting the position really matters.

I found that I had unreasonable expectations for the elections process. I only wanted to be elected to office on my own very narrowly defined terms. Even now, despite all of my anthropological training and close-hand observations, I remain irrational about how elections should work.

Possibly it’s because I still believe in federal self-government but get depressed about the degrading electoral practices which seem to end up as the lowest form of marketing on the planet.

Of course, Madison (my favorite federalist, sorry Mrs. Roth) had big ideas about intra-state factionalism and the means to limit its negative effects thru a federal system here in Federalist Paper No. 10. In fact, having read a lot of social theory on faction, I still think Mr. Madison’s is one of the more thoughtful and clearly written pieces out there.

Unfortunately, he remains silent on the nitty gritty of the electoral process and its issues. I dimly recall that there were times in American history when it was considered proper and appropriate to get everyone drunk and then take them to the polls. We live in more sober times.

And I’ve clearly lived too privileged a life to persist in thinking that I don’t need to use every advantage I can possibly obtain (including a glossy coat!) in the competition.

Incidentally, there were plenty of prettier girls in the class (who didn’t kick boys who pulled their hair) if they were going to go on such an arbitrary measure!

My sister, Mrs. Roth, won the vice-presidential elections. After all the elections were over we all had to give little acceptance speeches in preparation for the official inauguration (and more civics lessons) the next day.

I told the class I’d bring cake. That may sound strange to many people, but to a southerner, it might not. Potluck was typically a part of public celebrations and cake was a big feature of that. I don’t recall a single event, school or church, that didn’t involve cake in some way. It’s how I was brought up.

It turns out I accidentally revived an older American tradition of serving Election Cake. Apparently election cakes were part of the celebrations and food items surrounding election days in colonial times. This tradition might be inherited from Britain, I don’t know. Election cakes were typically fruit cakes and, like all early cakes, required some kind of yeast in order to rise. So if you tried one now you’d probably think it was more like sweet fruit bread and be terribly disappointed that it wasn’t remotely like the much beloved American butter cake.

I found out about the existence of election cakes recently when I got this interesting old cookbook for xmas from my father and step-mother, Ice Cream and Cakes, found within the Katherine Bitting collection of food history at the Library of Congress.

Here are some pictures of the front and side of my book. It’s fairly elaborately decorated, which I understand is common for books of the period.

Written by “an American”, the book is full of old and interesting looking recipes, including two versions of election cake and two versions of federal cake.

Here’s the one for election cake:

I think an early recipe for election cake can be found in the famous Fannie Farmer cookbook from the early 20th century. As you can see it’s pretty similar in idea to the one from my cookbook.

From some minor web sleuthing, it seems clear that federal cake is simply the same old election cake idea but dressed up and named “federal” in honor of the new federal constitution back in 1780s and 90s. Actually, when the new American constitution was passed, I think a lot of rather silly public celebrations in which everything was named “federal” this or that. One mention in book about L’Enfant, the erstwhile and only partial designer of the city of Washington, D.C., mentions a huge federal cake created as a confectionary celebration of the new government (scroll down to paragraph 20 here).

Here’s the federal cake recipe from Ice Cream and Cakes here:

I found another recipe for federal cake on the web here.

My own brief election experience did result in my own election cake. I brought enough lemon butter cake with a lemon sugar frosting for the entire class. I don’t recall much else about my brief time in office, other than that the cake was well received.

Perhaps I would like American election politics better if we revived the tradition of the Election Day holiday complete with Election Cake. Would more people participate if they knew there was cake at the end?

I’d like to think so.

It’s better to end something contentious and often bitter with something sweet!

Is there a Ndembu Witch Doctor in the House?

2007-01-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

Every winter I spend here in sunny AZ, I wonder how I survived Chicago's annual fimbulwinter and the attendant depressive hyperactive internal ruminations that the lack of sunlight and endless grey days appeared to produce.

In particular I am reminded of the melancholic winter discussions I used to have with H, who was one of my good college buddies, about the treatment of the suite of mental illnesses that can be best summed up as, "does not play well with others" but not extreme enough for jail and/or a padded cell.

By way of background, I was an anthropology major and H was a psychology major who almost double-majored (had Chicago allowed that sort of thing) in anthropology. H went on to get her PhD in clinical psychology and is even now dealing with mostly male prisoners in a high security prison. She's an adorable petite blond, so I imagine her dealing with Hannibal Lector type situations often.

H and I got to know one another well on an archaeological field school in the Cantabrian region of Spain digging a Lower Paleolithic cave site (if there’s something more boring than the Lower Paleolithic, it’s the Upper Paleolithic) so we had plenty of need for distractions. We spent hours together talking about the anthropological components of how less extreme mental aberrations are dealt with in different societies.

Anyone who has attended an archaeological field school will understand why the subject of anti-social behavior and mental illness was on our minds. Field schools in general would make for another blog entirely as they really are their own unique “lord of the flies” style venue.

Let me be clear, we were not discussing the normal amounts of sub-divisions and cliques that develop in all communities (like the archetypal American High School jocks versus band geeks or something like that). We were discussing cases where there are consistent problems of getting along with any social group, no matter how specialized and/or marginal due to serious behavioral problems.

I had learned a little about the social aspects of treatment and diagnoses in mental illness while taking a class titled, Medicine and Culture, taught by Jean Comaroff, at U of Chicago. H always had interesting perspectives to add from psychology in which clinical treatment is often put into practice under specific cultural parameters. By this, I mean that certain treatments, like therapy, are designed to help individuals meet and maintain “normal” social relationships and hence are overtly culturally imbedded.

H and I mostly discussed the personality disorders as described by the controversial Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These are basically mental disorders that lead people to think that they are fantastically brilliant, powerful, sexually attractive, and able to write poetry and read French even when they are sober.

As an aside I wonder if there isn’t something to the so-called mental “stages” of development that make everyone suffer from some form of so-called “personality disorders” before we grow up enough to know better. For example, I remember a time when I was about four, that I thought that marrying me would be just about the highest compliment anyone could get. Years of socialization have, alas, convinced me this is not the case. (Mr. Pretzel Bender believes that I still harbor such feelings but have grown wily enough to conceal them from the public. No comment.)

Cynically, I view a lot of the personality disorders much like I view the so-called “personality types”. I think they’re a bunch of heuristic sorting devices masquerading as real types with predictive power. The “bad” traits are lumped under empirically messy “groups” called separate personality disorders that cannot be linked directly to specific brain conditions or chemical imbalances. This point is driven home by the fact that psychologists themselves often assign multiple and overlapping personality disorders to folks. The disclaimers the professionals typically use are that they are useful for “research purposes” which is a funny way of justifying reifications!

This is not to say that there aren’t real brain disorders that manifest in personality “problems”. Folks may exhibit many symptoms found among the personality disorders due to medical conditions and in lesser cases, therapy may help them develop coping strategies even if it does not address the chemical imbalance issues directly…but I digress.

Basically, the personality disorder “types” main function is to provide a neat label for insurance claims and treatment approaches. And I concede that the labels make it easier to soft pedal the harsh critique of the different negative traits as it’s easier to say “you have histrionic personality disorder” instead of, “you’re an attention whore who thinks too highly of yourself and it’s causing people to dislike you and lovers to leave you so get over your bad self”. Of course, if they look up the personality disorder traits, it’s pretty obviously a direct translation.

H had similar views herself, and commented further on the phenomenon in which a person, upon reading the Diagnostic Manual on Mental Disorders, would begin to see them everywhere (not entirely unlike me and my sister’s reaction to reading Camus’s The Plague in high school where we became suspicious that every cough could be a symptom, however unlikely, of the deadly pneumonic form of the bubonic plague). H would doubtless be amused by The Onion’s take on the tendency towards amateur mental health diagnoses in this article.

Our favorite topic led us into a discussion of cross-cultural therapy, or more appropriately, methods for dealing with social problems through “social medicine”. One book that I particularly enjoyed in the Medicine and Culture class was Victor Turner’s The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual.

Turner’s book is a series of ten essays about ritual among the Ndembu people of Zambia in central Africa. Originally compiled in the 1960s, Turner’s book continues to be referenced so it must continue to be of value to Africanists.

The bit that I remember most vividly from this book concerns the Ilhamba cult, which I recalled in shorthand as the Ndembu tooth extraction ritual. I believe that Turner’s theoretical perspective informed his view of various ritual and medicine cults as means of providing social cohesion in the mobile and politically unstable village units. At the time I was more fascinated by his interpretation of witch doctor practice as therapy than his social theories.

As an aside, although he has been labeled as being a member of the structural functionalist theory camp (don’t ask, anthros like labels), upon reading him again, I find that he is hard to pigeonhole. He combines ethnographic narratives with anthropological syntheses in well-written essays which, although informed by notions of social “functionality” of ritual form, never descend into caricature. There’s no substitute for good old-fashioned data gathering is there?

According to Turner, Ilhamba refers to the upper central incisor tooth of a deceased hunter. A hunter’s incisors in particular bear a special meaning and power among the Ndembu. One usage concerns inheritance of the teeth as charms for hunters. The second usage is the notion of hunter teeth as potential escapees, wandering teeth in search of flesh that, once theoretically embedded in unfortunate victims, can cause all matter of harm. This harm can be inflicted by unhappy dead relatives or outside sorcerers or witches working their influence from outside. The Ilhamba affliction is the cause of the tooth extraction ritual, which as Turner describes it, amounts to social group therapy. As he puts it, the witch doctors who undertake the cure of Ilhamba are, “well aware of the benefits of their procedures for group relationships, and they go to endless trouble to make sure that they have brought into the open the main sources of latent hostility in group life.” (1967: 367).

One case study described a man named K who did not get on well with his community. K was a bit high-handed, a little too certain of his extreme importance in the world and was apparently unable to live up to social expectations of his behavior in terms of reciprocation, social duties, etc.

Even the outside observer anthropologist seems under whelmed by the patient describing him in generally unfavorable terms, “he was more snobbish than most”…”he [K] felt that, ‘people were always speaking things against’ him”…”withdrew from village affairs and shut himself up in his hut for long periods of time”.

K wasn’t liked and he wasn’t happy about it.

What to do?

Well, call the witch doctor of course!

The witch doctor in K’s case first took charge by interviewing K and many of his associates to assess the general social situation. Next, the performance of the Ilhamba extraction was undertaken. K required several different extractions based on the judgment of the witch doctor of the complexity of his case.

During the performance the whole community is present and the witch doctor makes incisions on the patient, and places cupping devices (animal horns) on the incisions which in addition to being suctioned on the body are actually sucked on themselves (they have the small end cut off) so that during the ceremony, blood will come out of them. The whole thing takes several hours with periodic checking of the horns to see if the human tooth of the hunter shade causing the problems has appeared in one of them. During each break, when the tooth has failed to appear, the witch doctor explains reasons for why the Ilhamba won’t come basically detailing the history of the patient and inter-community problems. Community members are then exhorted to come forward and confess any hidden ill-will towards the patient and the patient is likewise encouraged to confess his or her feelings of ill-will and grudges.

At the center of it all is the witch doctor, who includes people strategically into all parts of the drama to manage community conflict. At the end, after everyone has had their say, a real human tooth appears in one of the horns removed from one of the swollen and bloody incisions to much rejoicing.

Ick. Actual wounds and blood! (Turner comments that the tooth appearance though obviously faked, does not make the ceremony any less significant.)

In the case that Turner describes, K ‘s extractions allowed him to rejoin the community with many of his old problems and village tensions resolved. In visiting a year after his observation of the ceremony, Turner found that K was ostensibly doing better and more or less fitting in.

Turner concludes that the real task of the Ndembu witch doctor was not to cure K’s individual ills or to tell K what he was doing wrong; rather, it was to heal the corporate group and allow K to interact positively with the whole, which required everyone’s participation. Turner also notes that the Ilhamba ritual took time to deal with K’s delicate interpersonal relationships and problems. H and I noted that the ritual also allowed K some amount of absolution in that he was not required to “take blame” for his Ilhamba affliction, although he was required to listen to his misdeeds and even offer criticisms of his own. And it was all backed by a powerful belief system.

H and I found this fascinating. H claimed that like the Ndembu tooth extraction ritual, American therapy really wasn't designed to “tell people the truth"...one reason (among many) that I would make a terrible therapist.

For example, I would have the almost overpowering urge to say, “Well, actually, your relationship problems stem from your [insert negative character trait here]; these traits, combined with infractions [e.g., cheating, boozing, neglect, etc.] have proven fatal in every case so just stop doing it already."

Apparently, American therapy is not about telling folks who they really are or how they are actually perceived by society at large.

Instead, it's all about behavior modification.

Therapists are highly trained manipulators.

They are there to help you, as H euphemistically put it, "interact positively with others". People are typically in therapy because they’ve recognized that they have a problem in their interpersonal interactions and/or in how they treat themselves/their body (addiction, etc.). Or their families and friends tell them they need it.

The therapist in this NYTimes article appears to agree with H’s take on therapy, further noting that people's need to find reasons (they had a terrible childhood, etc.) is less important than that they find a way to change their behavior and that folks finding redemptive reasons for “why” were actually detracting from the point of their therapy, which was to enact personal change not grant absolution.

It seems that American therapists in this case may underestimate people's need for absolution. It's not many people that can take on their own weaknesses and faults head-on. What they really want to hear is that somehow it's not their fault.

Metaphysical absolution is apparently easier to achieve than the acceptance of peers and lovers through social negotiation.

But seriously, after the Ndembu example, simple supernatural redemption seems like a cop-out to me. Clearly the downside of American therapy is that there are few mechanisms for group re-integration other than relying on the individual’s own personal abilities and impetus to socialize. I fear this means that only those with relatively tractable behavioral maladies will have the ability to gain acceptance and form better social connections with therapeutic help as it currently stands.

The rest will flounder with no communally understood and accepted means of re-integration.

Our way seems a bit cold-hearted to me!

Serious social problems, even in complex societies like ours, which tolerate deviance better than Ndembu villages, carry their own terrible built-in penalties in the form of social isolation, whether self-imposed or socially imposed.

The Ilhamba cult, because it allowed for both absolution (the patient is not blamed for the Ilhamba affliction) while simultaneously insisting on open airing of bad feelings and behavioral problems with a re-integrative resolution, appealed to me and H as a preferred method.

However, Turner himself was cynical as to the efficacy of such therapeutic cult practice without the religious belief system backing it up. He ends his essay on the Ilhamba cult by concluding, “Stripped of its supernatural guise, Ndembu therapy may well offer lessons for Western clinical practice. For relief might be given to many sufferers from neurotic illness if all those involved in their social networks could meet together and publicly confess their ill will toward the patient and endure in turn the recital of his grudges against them. However, it is likely that nothing less than the ritual sanctions for such behavior and belief in the doctor’s mystical powers could bring about such humility and compel people to display charity toward their suffering “neighbor”!” (1967:393).

Unfortunately, these sorts of things rely on the tractability of all parties as well as an adept practitioner of the witch doctor therapy cure!

Bring on the Ndembu witch doctors!

Cake Tectonics

2006-11-12T23:32:00.000-07:00

Recently, I attempted to make a birthday cake for Mr. Roth, my brother-in-law. He’d been reading a bit about Salvador Dali, so I decided to attempt a cake with a general Dali theme. Due to vagaries of fillings and such, it turned out to be a bit more Dali-esque than I had initially envisioned.

I had imagined making a cake much like the following Dali painting. Admittedly it’s not that exciting. Rose suspended in blue space is a bit like purple unicorns …kitschy and one has a general feeling that it signifies something else. But, frankly, it seemed easier to do in cake form than some of his other more famous paintings. For example, although I do like some of his crucifixions, they’re hardly birthday cake decorating material. At least, not to my mind.

Aside from the decorations, I have standards I wish to uphold in the taste of the cake itself. After ascertaining from Mr. Roth that he wished some sort of chocolate and was also fond of cake and jam, I decided to make him a sour cream fudge cake with chocolate butter frosting (more or less plainly decorated) and some sort of yellow cake with a jam filling.

I picked a golden buttercream cake which has some unique properties. It has a fine crumb and it tastes like it’s going to be a dense pound cake at first and then once it’s in your mouth it melts away. I think it’s something to do with the sugar, or maybe high amounts of butter. And it smells wonderful. It’s from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible (which I highly recommend for her yellow and white butter cakes, I’ve had less success with her chocolate cakes).

Then I had to decide on fillings. I was torn between lemon curd and red raspberry jam. So I optimistically decided to do both. I was going to top it all off with a thin layer of buttercream and then cover that with a quick-pour fondant, which is basically a thick and shiny glaze that I could color in a nice swirly blue with gold glitter to achieve a look at least suggestive of the sky in the painting.

First, I sculpted a red rose using gum paste. Gum paste, for the uneducated, is basically sugar cement that has gum in it making it intially flexible much like clay before drying.

It’s a strange conceit in the world of confectionary, but it appears that aside from fresh and typically edible flowers, all of the sugar decorations are supposed to be technically edible. I say “technically” because they are practically not edible unless you enjoy gnawing hard as rock blocks of sculpted sugar.

Frankly, even the “chewy” gum paste I used to make daisies for a cake wasn’t really all that edible although one enterprising person did actually chomp down quite a few to my amazement. They even ate the royal icing flower pollen centers and inner petals which were made of royal icing, which is made with meringue powder, and is another really hard sugar and not really all that palatable either.

Unfortunately, red tinting in gum paste never turns out as red as I wanted it so I painted it with red paste food coloring for that nice bloody red wet look. For all I know, it’s still wet, the darn thing wouldn’t dry.

I should say that the chocolate cake turned out fine.

It was the fillings in the fancy decorated yellow cake that provide the lesson in cake tectonics.

Cake decorating books will all tell you one thing about using fillings. They advise using an icing dam around the edges of the cake to hold in the filling in the center of the cake so it doesn’t ooze out between cake layers. This illustration gives you the basic idea.

It was my choice of fillings where I made the fatal errors. First, I used lemon curd which already a bit on the gooey and non-stable side. Second, the raspberry jam that I used had seeds, which I hate, so I strained most of them out, thinking I could put the now runny jam into the middle of the lemon curd filling and have it be more or less held into place. That didn’t really work as planned.

The filling had too much liquid and ended up making the top cake layer float atop it not unlike the lithosphere (earth’s crust and the hard part of the mantle) floating atop the more viscous asthenosphere (which wiki says “flows like a liquid in geological time”).

Actually, in real plate tectonics, the pressure from the upper and lower layers produces all kinds of interesting dynamics that obviously don’t apply to cakes. However, the salient point is that the viscosity of the filling made the upper cake layer “unstable” much like the “plates” of earth’s crust.

Witness the happy results in cake form!
It doesn’t look to bad from above, though it is only vaguely reminiscent of the Dali painting.

Here, you can clearly see the movement of the upper layer has put the cake into more of irregular shape with bulging sides and cracks (though you can’t see them) in the fondant covering.

It tasted good and Mr. Roth didn’t appear overly upset at its structural problems.

In future, I will stick to thicker fillings (and less of them) so as not to have any more impromptu lessons in plate motion!

Tobacco versus the Ants

2006-10-13T22:55:00.000-07:00

This blog was inspired by one written by Mr. Roth on the subject of the efficacy of Anglo-Saxon medicine. I decided to look up the old sixteenth and seventeenth century texts on Mesoamerican medicine and folk remedies that predated the Spaniards to see if there was anything that had a modern counterpart that worked. I immediately got distracted by one source in particular, the excitable Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon and his Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain, 1629 translated and edited by J. Richard Andrews and Ross Hassig.

I haven't really read enough books like Infusions of Healing: A Treasury of Mexican-American Herbal Remedies or know enough biomedicine to know what works and what doesn't. There are a few such glossaries of old Prehispanic remedies but they rarely appear to be written or edited by someone with the combined knowledge of the texts and biochemistry to give the lay reader a fair chance of knowing what modern medicines may actually match up. In fact, as the author Joie Davidow of that volume suggests, much of Sahagun's previous work on herbal remedies was suppressed after his run-in with the Inquisition with the result that much of that early information was lost to us.

Alarcon, because he was an enthusiastic pursuer of continuing native "idolatry" in his role as a priest, and later, I believe, as an inquisitor himself, had a manuscript that survived mostly intact with examples of native remedies and incantations. I don't know too much about him otherwise, although I had actually heard of his more famous brother, a certain Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, a famous playright in Spain.

While there is some dark fascination with reading Alarcon's dramatic text filled as it is with contempt for the unfortunate locals he is catching at idolatry, I will focus on the parts about the ants. Specifically, about ways to kill ants.

It turns out that despite Alarcon's general skepticism of the "heathen superstitions", this is one case in which the methods are actually proven.

Chapter 13, titled, Against Ants proves particularly instructive.

It's very short, so I will quote Alarcon entirely and sum up the incantations below.

Alarcon's text:
In another Treatise I mentioned a certain Martin de Luna, a native of Temimiltzinco, in the Amilpas, who was one hundred and ten years old, and was held in high repute and to be of consummate wisdom among the Indians. I think that he had gained this reputation with these infernal spells, as will be seen in this and in other Treatises, where I will quote him for his evil skills. He used to use the preceding incantation or exorcism against coatis and the one that follows against ants. I came to know the latter from Captain Pedro de Ochoa, an inhabitant of the Amilpas. After I had gotten my hands on the incantation and on Martin de Luna, who was arrested on account of this superstition, he denied it, even though it was proved against him, and he had on other occasions fallen into prison for these causes and had been convicted, he denied it stubbornly, until I began his wicked and superstitious incantation, which is:

[here I just summarize a bit of what the incantation says, it's by no means academic, so don't hold it against Andrews and Hassig's scholarship! PB]

Incantation 1:
He threatens the ants, telling them to respect the sown field and to either tear down their ant hill or regret it.

Alarcon's text:
With this he claimed that the ants would not again do harm to the grove or the sown field. But if at times they overstepped, not showing they had understood, in that case he carried out his threat, going ahead with the destruction of their house, which he also did by conjuring a certain quantity of water and throwing it on the anthill and sprinkling the outer edge and circumference of the anthill with his so-venerated pisiete [tobacco]. And in order to conjure the water he used the following words:

Incantation 2:
He invokes Chalchiuhcueyeh (water goddess) and tells her to destroy the ants and their anthill.

Alarcon's text:
Having made this incantation, he used to pour one or two pitchers of conjured water into the mouth and entrance of the anthill where earlier he had spread his venerated pisiete. And with this he claimed that either the anthill would totally collapse or the ants would move their dwelling very far from there. For an infallible effect (in his judgement) he conjures the pisiete also, saying:

Incantation 3: [This one is cool, so I am including Andrews and Hassig's translation and the Nahuatl. PB]

English:
Let it be soon! Green Priest, Turquoise-flutterer [i.e. tobacco], what is he doing? Go in order to pursue the person from Popotlan [i.e. the ants].

Nahuatl:
Tla cuel! Xoxouhqui Tlamacazqui, Xiuhpahpatlantzin, tleh axticah? Tla xocontohtocati in Popotecatl.

The End (of Manuel de Luna, that is). Poor old guy. His method of using tobacco water as an anticide turns out to have a modern scientific basis!

It turns out that Tobacco is known as an effective insecticide. And furthermore, the use of Tobacco infused water is recognized as an "organic" insecticide, see wiki's Tobacco water entry.

So ants hate tobacco for a good reason. Nicotine is a neurotoxin that is deadly to them (and the arachnids, like scorpions). Smoking it only gets one a tiny dose whereas eating it can prove deadly (well, if you manage to absorb it properly) so it's really not a good idea to use it when you have curious pets who might eat anything. Of course, caffeine is also a pesticide and I consume it daily. Oops.

Ants avoid nicotine so much that they apparently also avoid some types of caterpillars that have eaten it. See this interesting journal article on the subject here where Argentine ants apparently avoid eating larvae that have consumed tobacco leaves.

All this ant-killing talk reminds me of a somewhat un-PC short story favorite of mine, Leiningen versus the Ants, an epic tale of one man's determined battle against brazilian army ants. Here's the wiki summary of the story here and here's the full text of Leiningen versus the Ants. It's very short and worth a quick look.

In the story Leiningen is a planter...it doesn't say of what, but we can safely say it wasn't tobacco!

Some years ago a terrible movie was made of brazilian army ants and their hypothetical invasion of Canada. It was so terrible I couldn't continue watching it after the first honeymooning couple bought it while exploring the giant curious large earthen mound (read, anthill) in the woods.

But I digress.

So there you have it, a Prehispanic anticide that actually works. Since tobacco is a New World plant and one whose chemical properties were not isolated or studied for several centuries after the Spanish Conquest, Alarcon's mention of Tobacco water for use as an insecticide may well be the first mention of its special properties. It's certainly something for future research.

Perhaps next time I will deal with Sahagun's tar/bitumen for skin ailments remedy and its link to the modern tar-based dandruff shampoos. Or not...dandruff isn't as exciting as ants.

There's no such thing as a free cake, part II?

2006-09-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

So now we've established that gifts, even innocent looking birthday cakes, may represent antagonistic obligation. Is this true in every circumstance? Are all birthday cakes, as a friend of mine once put it, potential power struggles? I submit that in some circumstances they are and in some they aren't. I propose to quantify and analyze my own cake baking to test the degree to which birthday cakes I've baked fit into more into the antagonistic obligation or whether they were more characterized as free.

Whether they are free versus debt depends on several things including: the relationship of the baker to the bakee, the circumstances of the gift (often they are asked for by third parties, in which case the "obligation" goes elsewhere) such as whether it was bartered, traded or even debt payment itself, the conditions in which the gift is presented (public versus private venue), and finally, intention on my part.

Oh yeah, and the relative rank of the requestor in relation to me matters as well. If they are a peer as opposed to a boss or superior then they are more likely to be “marked”. My superiors can simply take cake as their just due.

So I thought long and hard about all of the birthday cakes I’ve made over the past two years (or so) and came to an immediate conclusion. The first observation is that I make a huge amount of cake for people and two that I have a disturbingly good memory for what type of cake I made, down to the filling and the icing. I am, in fact, completely cake obsessed.

But I digress. First, let’s look at the data.

Here’s the basic tabulation of columns I came up with so you get the idea of the kind of data I’m collecting from the cake memory hard-wired into some part of my brain.

Bakee, Requestor, Requested?, Type of Cake/Icing, Complicated Level, Decorated, Relationship, Rank, Years Known, Venue, Trade/Barter/Debt Payment?, Intent, Results, Labor Cost (combo of complicated level, decorated labor weighted).

Some basic data trends and an excel spreadsheet later:
Number of Birthday Cakes made = 16
Requested (by someone other than me) = 5 out of 16
Cake Types = 8 vanilla variants (buttercream, golden genoise, white, yellow), 6 chocolate variants (devils food, sour cream fudge, german chocolate), 2 fruit (lemon, strawberry) As an aside, I notice that I have made more vanilla than chocolate cakes. As a little kid I ALWAYS picked vanilla shakes and ice cream over chocolate. At some level, I’m still doing that.
Complicated Level = 9 Low, 5 Medium, 2 High
Decorated = 7

For basic analysis, I began by looking for trends that might seem likely to point towards obligation. Let’s start with the requested cakes, which have the most possibility for obvious reciprocation right off the bat. Of the 5 cakes that were requested, 4 were Medium to High complicated level and were decorated. This is unsurprising and leads into a few basic points.

In general we can say that the higher the labor cost combined with the nature of the venue will be important variables in incurring debt. This is because higher labor (on my part) and a public venue would create more “debt” pressure.

Of the five requested birthday cakes, 4 were in the "high cost" bracket and of those, 3 were in public parties. Those three appear to be the ones with the highest potential debt value. One can be eliminated because the requestor and cakee were a superior and it was a going away/birthday party. A second can also be eliminated because it was "paid" for, actually MORE than paid for by a really cool fifties metal cake keeper given to me on the part of the requestor who asked me to make a birthday cake for a friend of hers. I think I still owe the person on that one; I made out like a bandit. As an added bonus the person I made the cake for, who was only an acquaintance at the time, is now a friend (was it the cake?). The third requestor was originally going to help me make and decorate the cake but backed out at the last minute (on the helping part anyways). That may have helped create indebtedness if the wily requestor hadn’t then told me she didn't like it anyway (it was for her guy) so it really was a total bust as far as actually working antagonistically.* (More on this point will be dealt with later, about whether someone can feel indebtedness. This matters if I am foolishly trying to create debt on their part.)

So I wasn't all that successful at antagonistic cake giving in the requested cake factor (the other two were for and by family). What about the cakes offered and not asked for? Surely I did some marked gift giving there? Well, here again it depends. Those we hold closest to us like good friends and immediate family are not typically obligated by cake giving for birthdays. Actually I cannot say this for all cultures, but I can suggest it was the case for my own family history.

Let’s take a look.

Here’s Pretzel on the left and Mrs. Roth on the right at about age two holding giant decorated birthday cakes and wearing huge grins. At age 2 or so, we are being inculcated in the joys of birthday cake giving and especially receiving.

Here’s another one of Pretzel and Mrs. Roth helping our grandmother bake her 62nd birthday cake (Pretzel’s holding the cake pan).

Here’s another one of Pretzel eyeing the decorations. According to my mother I was very particular about that sort of thing. My mouth is open because I am talking. I believe the words "crazed parrot" were used often to describe it.

And a further evidence of my Grandparents singing happy birthday and waiting for cake. My grandmother does not appear to be unduly obligated here. In fact, she seems quite pleased and affectionate. Her birthday was August 23rd, 1918. I'm sorry I couldn't make her cake this year.

Here’s my favorite part. Eating the cake.

And it’s not just the grandparents that got in on the birthday cake action.

Here’s one of Mrs. Roth, me, and my Mother, with her 29th birthday cake. We didn’t do the writing (I believe my grandmother helped with that) but from the messy icing, you can see that we did the rest. Actually, I learned fractions at a very young age due to baking, another bonus.

And here’s one of me, Mrs. Roth and my father with his rather squashed looking birthday cake, another twin baking special. We also insisted on trying to put all 34 candles or so on his cake. I'm the one smiling at him.

These are just the early and few samples of birthday cake baking that was a tradition in my family. I recall them more as tribute for the birthday person. Actually, one early memory I have is of always waking up on my birthday to find paper streamers decorating me and my sis’s room on our birthday. My mom always made birthdays for everyone around us seem very special. I recall making many cakes for parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins (when they were around) and friends. Maybe it was an American Southern tradition, I don’t know.

I recall many homely coconut cakes with our attempts at seven minute frosting for my mother (who was fond of coconut) where we never seemed to beat the frosting enough. She was sanguine anyway, even when we decided to ruin it one year by putting a lot of maraschino cherries on it (it looked like someone had killed a polar bear on a plate) because we knew that she liked cherries (bing cherries as it turned out).

Ah cake memories. I still remember how most of ‘em tasted too.

Back to the analysis. Clearly, when I make cakes for those I hold dear, it’s not all for ritual obligation, but part of a family tradition. It turns out that of the 16 cakes made, 10 were for people I've known more than 5 years and for those other 6 in the less than five years bracket, I can say that 4 were for people I really like, two for friends (good ones!) and two for a brother in law (aka Mr. Roth).

Well, I suppose the obvious critique is that I am too close to this analysis to really be objective about my own intentions in the matter. Fair enough. And I also inserted cute kiddie pics to make my rhetorical point! But that brings us back to the point I suggested earlier as to whether I can operate on the assumption that someone will actually feel the indebtedness that I wish to put there if I wanted to do it.

I think birthday cake baking, at least in this part of the world, is not one that fits into a ritual system that all recognize. The majority of cakes I made for people were low labor cost and not decorated. The few in public venues were still not within a recognizable system of obligation, like wedding gifts or graduation gifts. So clearly the lack of a commonly recognized birthday cake ritual of reciprocation makes it a little harder to use it as an antagonistic competitive device. It’s not to say that it couldn’t be done. In fact, I've clearly gotten a lot out of it in terms of reinforcing friend and family ties and also eating lots of cake (which is always a positive experience). I just don’t seem to be very good at gaining a clear upper hand in my social network by baking cakes. In fact, I can safely say that in a few cases (and I’m thinking of the guy who brought me back the Xanath vanilla liqueur from Mexico AND the Hokkaido cream stew sauce from Japan) I owe the cakee way more cake than I could possibly bake soon!

Generally, I do recognize that one has to be secure in one's relationships to accept gifts without feeling obligation debts where none are intended. And let's be fair, I did get a lot of vocal "yums" out of it, which of course I treasure along with the smiles. So, yeah, I suppose you could say that I got quite a bit out of all the cake baking. I got to engage in a hobby I enjoy, make people I (mostly) know well and like happy, and I scored a few compliments along the way.

Is it a hardship to get birthday cake from me? Well, only if the strawberry icing melts off of your cake onto the table (sorry Mrs. Roth).

So yes, there is such a thing as free cake in this world. Free and obligation free Birthday cake can be yours if I really like you, have known you for a while, owe you something, you are related to me closely, and if it's a relatively private venue (like an office or at home). Oh yeah, and your chances are almost 2/3rds greater if you're a girl. 10 of the 16 birthday cakes were for women.
Actually those numbers are even greater because of the 6 ostensibly for men, 2 of them were requested by women. This is even less surprising when you consider that most of my close friends are women.

Here are a few that I made for birthdays that also happen to be decorated. The first one's my favorite.

Chinese porcelain? Sort of...

Art Deco, 42 is the age of the gal for whom the cake was made.

I was going for the Blue Delft ceramic tradition but the blue is more baby blue than the proper cobalt blue.

Incidentally, I didn't include cakes I've made for Mr. Pretzel Bender in this blog for a reason.

He's out outlier because I've made him too many.

Wedding cakes are another story. But I think I'll have to save that for another blog.

There's no such thing as a free cake, pt I ?

2006-09-23T14:15:00.000-07:00

Cake making is a hobby of mine that began when I was very young. And it began with making birthday cakes. An early picture of me and my sister shows us helpfully stirring cake batter for a birthday cake for my grandmother. Her birthday was in August and every year we made her a cake. Her favorite was yellow cake with chocolate icing.

The original cake we used to make was simply titled, "yellow layer cake" and it was from a very old and dog-eared book. This cake was very dry although it has a certain buttery and rich taste that I haven't really found replicated anywhere combined with a tender crumb. My mom always said it was expected that you would put a simple syrup (sugar and water combo) onto layer cakes to aid in preservation of moistness.

Of course, that's not really the practice now. Now we have super cake mixes that are so resilient to error that one can make them without the oil or egg, just water and some baking powder and they turn out just fine. Supposedly the first cake mixes were made without anyone having to add anything but water, but they tested poorly in markets because people wanted to feel like they were really making something and that meant they had to add real ingredients. This is because part of the cake making was the act of mixing itself, not merely the appearance of a baked cake.

I happily theorize that the rise of home done cake decorating (of course, the elites have been competing in sugar decorations since forever) is possibly the result of adding the competitive and labor intensive aspect back into what was, due to oven reliability, baking powder, and then cake mixes, an increasingly trivial process. It's just a theory. Of course, if you doubt me, consider this...a high powered middle class wage earner makes, say, 50 bucks an hour, and a cake including decorating, takes 2 or 3 hours. If the person spent what amounts to 2 -3 hours of salary or 150 bucks on a cake, they would get a pretty darn fancy decorated one. However, because it was only labored over indirectly (via their work hours) it is not considered with the same sort of appreciation of the taste or the artistry!

Clearly, we value the act, the labor of making it DIRECTLY in some way...so that the cakes I could MAKE my grandmother for her birthday outweighed, in value, any cake I could buy for her. It's what makes making birthday cakes so special and fun to do. There is value in the act of doing it yourself that isn't just because it "saves money". Our proximity to the cake making process itself makes it "better" in some way. It is somehow more of a "gift" the more it is out of the crass commercial wage earning and speciality production MARKET.

Interesting way to assess value of gifts isn't it? It doesn't work for everything though does it? There are different gifting traditions attached to different items. I mean, you wouldn't expect your fiance to create your engagement ring him or herself would you? But somehow, when it comes to food, "homemade" carries more currency in most situations then "store-bought".

This leads nicely into a tangent about the "gift economy". A famous french sociologist, Marcel Mauss (and nephew to Emile Durkheim) wrote extensively about the social obligations of gift giving in his essay, The Gift. I had to read the 1990 Halls translation of this book for an undergraduate anthropology seminar. The cliff notes version of the book is that Mauss describes systems of gift-giving within different cultural examples as creating networks of obligation and competition. Gift-giving is often antagonistic or intended to control the giftee by creating that sense of public obligation.

There is also a sense of being "marked" that has been explored in more ethnographic details in other works, for example in a class on Hindu culture, a book The Poison in the Gift, describes a complex situation in which gift giving is used to contruct and restate one's place within the castes. At least, that's my cliff notes version! There's something that all of us in the class (Americans all, though from different "ethnicities" and regions) really couldn't completely grasp about the gift giving as marking and property collecting as negative thing.

The instructor, McKim Marriott attempted to teach us by having us play a game (called Samsara, naturally enough) on Saturdays in order to get us more into the "framework". In the game, which was kind of like a Hindu D & D game complete with a DM (Marriott himself) we were supposed to grow crops, exchange gifts and everything else with the goal of getting rid of all our material possessions to achieve "moksha" or release from the cycle. Well...we just kept trying to collect stuff like it was monopoly.
Poor guy was probably very frustrated.

It reminds me of another Anthropology class I had on the NW coast potlatch in which the class simply couldn't see the downside of being gifted with speedboats (some of the modern ones had that) or why you would want to compete in that way. I think I had my first proper demonstration at a large wedding of a friend in which the parents (from an Asian country) kept careful track of all the gifts of their peers (other asian couple doctors) so that they could return the gifts with interest when their kids got married. Fascinating stuff and certainly an interesting way to move capital and prestige around an ethnic community in greater Chicago. They kept up ties through these networks of ritual obligation.

I was reminded of the "poison" in gift exchange recently in regards to birthday cake baking!

Up next in part II, birthday cake as power struggle?

Light and Death

2006-09-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

This is about death in the form of light. Or more specifically, it's about different forms of electromagnetic radiation and weapons technology.

I first got started thinking about this lasers and death rays from Jim, a friend I work with for my day job. Jim has basically worked for a lot of really cool thinktank type places, like Bell Labs, NASA, etc...you get the idea. Now he's slumming it in quasi-retirement with academics. Jim and I like chewing the fat over any number of esoteric topics du jour. So...since Jim has worked on a lot of interesting projects over the years, including, as it turns out, intercontinental missile defense (or something pretty darn near it).

When you're a big government/research lab with lots of dough and lots of brain power, I guess it's pretty obvious that you're going to start thinking about REALLY big weapons before long. Maybe it's a guy thing. In one of our little chats, I had a recollection of Reagan's infamous Star Wars speech and the determined follow-up in the press of the unfeasibility of the whole thing. At the time I was quite young and more impressionable so I didn't really question the status quo. Now I had a chance, what did Jim think of this? He was succinct. The solution to missile defense shields were well known in the 1960s...laser cannons. Presumably the movability, the ability to refire, and the range, would really help. So...did such things exist? Well, he remarked that the technology for dealing with smaller more efficient lasers certainly existed right now. Back then, they'd even discussed issues like cloud cover (solution? infrared).

Jim was right. Sure enough I noticed an article by the associated press a few months later that mentioned that laser cannon technology had improved to the point where they were "exponentially smaller than a refrigerator" with applications for planes. Yeah, who thought that up that phrase? I can't find the original article, but this seems close: DARPA's "Star Wars" style laser cannon .

Now, they don't mention space applications, but they are obvious, aren't they? If you could solve the fuel problem for SVs or at least a method of collected fuel (like through solar panels) and passing them between them, you'd probably get close. Nice. But lasers aren't the only way. How about messy, non-coherent light like the sun's rays?

Turns out Archimedes, *may* have thought of that one as well.

A group of MIT students played around with the idea of using mirrors to focus the sun's rays onto mock ships. Here's their page on the matter:

MIT Archimedes Death Ray Experiment

Fun eh? Doesn't it make you want to set one up somewhere to annoy/scorch the neighbors?

So, now it's established that it's possible that one could exist, the question is does it? Dunno. But aside from all the good geek paranoid fun, what are the political implications of such a system?

A system that would be affordable to only a very few and make all the intercontinental missile arsenal defunct and ... well, it's obvious isn't it?

But that's not the only application out there.

I read this little article in the Guardian about lasers that can be used to see through solid objects. Yes, superman x-ray vision could be yours! And who says those guys were paranoid for thinking that G.I. sunglasses could be used to see through clothing! Now, of course, they have been vindicated in this article, which claims that the first steps have been taken in using lasers to see through solid objects. Cool.

Here's a final tangent on more government research on laser weapons. I've been reading about dazzlers for a while (though they aren't as cool as laser cannons or death rays) and finally we have some actual press.
Check it out - blinding your enemy or just annoying them with a REALLY BIG LASER POINTER.
Our government dollars at work! Well, not that hard at work. What's a million dollars here and there?
And on the laser weapon blinding you theme, why do we have a ban on weapons in warfare that maim or disfigure? Does this really make sense in that we don't ban weapons that KILL people? Although I guess we do have bans on weapons that really efficiently kill people (missile treaties and so forth). So...there's some middle ground here? It's okay to kill people in battle if you use the right weapons that don't work too efficiently and don't maim them intentionally to avoid killing them. I guess that shows that most of our wars, even the so-called "total wars" have some kind of political goals in which utterly annilating and/or maiming the enemy is counter productive.

In Memory of New Orleans, part I, Absinthe

2006-09-03T00:20:00.000-07:00

Since it's the year anniversary (give or take a week or two) of the most recent hurricane to damage the Gulf Coast, I thought I would write about a recent obsession of mine that coincides with the city of New Orleans.

Let's start with absinthe. I was born in New Orleans and lived in the area till I was 15.5, roughly half my life so far so I was at least tangentially aware of this green stuff called absinthe due to its production in belle epoque New Orleans. I took no direct interest in the stuff at the time because I was not really all that interested in alcohol. I was raised Southern Baptist and although I am officially now an apostate it still marks me in some ways. I first got interested in the green fairy this past summer when I was visiting the Delaware art museum and saw this poster:

The woman's demure black dress, the man's aristocratic leer complete with monocle and mustache...there's just so much to appreciate. Naturally I had to find out more about the substance that was advertised as so debauched. So, I checked out a few books from the library, like Phil Baker's The Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History and Barnaby Conrad's Absinthe: History in a Bottle to get started.

There was a lot of repetition but still, some interesting reading for sure. For starters, I can see that nihilistic determined self-destruction was really practiced as a high art form by much of the literati and bohemian art crowd in Paris and London. Absinthe, for all it's debauched reputation was really the least of it...absinthe got the bad rap for being, well, kinda cool. For one thing, it's taste was kind of antiseptic and there was also the way it was served with ice water slowly added to achieve the right louche (cloudy) color. Here's a great webpage with some more details: What is absinthe?

What I found more interesting was the intersection of ideas that people had about absinthe as a source of depravity and excess and the onset of world-wide prohibitions, not just of absinthe, but of alcohol. I had always assumed (through ignorance, obviously) that the prohibition of the USA was somewhat unique. Not so. Alcoholism and abuse was seen as a major problem in turn of the century Europe as well and they banned many distilled liquors in France and Switzerland. It could well be that the technology of distillation, which had gotten so refined, had created serious hard to handle stuff for consumption by a population used to drinking much milder stuff (like wine). After a few bad grape harvests, absinthe (and other liquors) actually became cheaper than wine and so became the mind-altering substance of choice for working class poor. I guess governments can overlook a few rich arty types over-doing it and dying in "circumstances of unrelieved horror" but not the working stiffs. At least, that's the theory. Of course, we all know what a bonus the prohibition was for organized crime. And it didn't stop usage (though it certainly brought absinthe production to a halt in some parts of the world)...oh well, seemed like a good idea at the time.

It certainly makes for an interesting aside into current drug abuse theories and practice. These little prohibitions seem to carry more ill side-effects than the abuse of the technology itself though of course with ever stronger distillations (of alcohol and drugs in general) it seems that governments will always try to control their availibility and use. They seem to go through fads as well. Apparently a certain Vin Mariani (wine with cocaine) was quite popular with Queen Victoria and the Pope (at the time) and complex societies always seem to use and abuse stimulants. I think they need 'em. Well, I have my own soft drug addictions like caffeine, chocolate, tea (wars have been fought over them!) that have their physical effects as well.

Even now, absinthe is banned in the USA. I am curious about it, but I think I couldn't bring myself to drink it...after all the hype, what could a taste do other than disappoint me?

Although in memory of New Orleans, I am very tempted to buy this historical recreation, Nouvelle Orleans, by Ted Breaux. Of course, I wouldn't drink it, but I do believe that I would clutch it quite happily.