The Illustrated Cake

A few days ago I mentioned amazing cakes decorated by Jessica, a friend of my son and his posse and a member of our Trivia team.  Jess began her cake activities as a fun thing, then people began making requests and putting in orders.  Under the name The Illustrated Cake, she is hoping one day to turn it into a business.  With her skills, that should be a piece of cake.  You go, girl!

Here are some of her works:

(Second plug of the week...)

The Illustrated Cake

jessica.pasqua@hotmail.com

Oh, did I say it was her birthday?  

Happy Birthday, Jess

 Some cake trivia:

The oldest cake is 2 pieces from the wedding cake of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert dated 1840 (above).   That wedding has additional cake significance.  The colour white has been attached to wedding ceremonies since Victoria wore a white wedding dress at her wedding to Albert, white having been  traditionally  associated with virginity and purity. The wedding cake was originally known as the brides cake  and therefore the colour white became common because the cake needed to reflect the bride.

Not an item about cakes but I can’t resist including it:  The Romans didn’t utilise wedding cakes, instead using unsweetened barley bread as the wedding food.  As part of the wedding ritual the groom would break a piece of bread in half over the brides head.  This symbolised the breaking of the bride’s virginal state and the groom’s  subsequent domination over her.

Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake.” The story goes that when told the peasants had no bread, she responded by making the above comment.  The anecdote appears in Rousseau’s autobiography Confessions, where he recounts that wanting some bread to go with wine he had stolen, he felt too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery.  It caused him to remember the words of an unnamed “great princess” who, having been told that the peasants had no bread, said “let them eat brioche.”  (Brioche included butter and eggs so was much richer than ordinary bread).  However, Marie Antoinette was only 9 years old when the works were first published and she was not in the country.  It had already been in circulation for 100 years by the time Rousseau recorded it.  Further, Marie Antoinette was of a kind and compassionate nature, the attribution to her being by her enemies at court.

By the way moment:

The word “cake” derives from the 13th century Old Norse language, where the word for cake was “kaka”.

Fancy a nice piece of cake?  Anyone?