With all due respect: Cake

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About the only way you’re going to get cake these days is if you bake it yourself. Cake, other than the flourless chocolate variety, is not the mode anymore in restaurants. Pastry chefs are more into intricate individual desserts. But then I’m forgetting Sharlena Fong’s red velvet and salt peanut cakes at the Nickel Diner downtown. Correction: Revise to ‘mostly out of fashion.’

So. Once you’ve beaten the sugar into the butter and added the eggs one by one, folded in the other ingredients, buttered and floured your cake pans and baked the cake, serving it on a plain plate isn’t going to do it. Your cake creation needs to be presented in all its glory on a proper cake stand.

Where to get one? At the shop next door to Intelligentsia on Abbot Kinney in Venice. Sorry, but they were locked up when I took the photo and there is no sign or number out front, and I’m certainly not going to drive back to Venice to get that info. Never mind. You should have no trouble finding the store, and anyway, you probably need to pick up some of Intelligentsia’s Black Cat espresso beans to serve with a slice of cake.

-- S. Irene Virbila