Let them eat cake. Piece of cake. That takes the cake. Have your cake and eat it, too.
Cake, of all things, particularly wedding cake, has become something of a media trope these days, a conversation flashpoint around the permutations of what is taxable and what isn't, and what costs more and what doesn't with the new HST.
Things were especially confusing if you listened to national news sources as B.C. and Ontario were implementing the HST at the same time. So hotline shows were filled with arcane details like Ontario wasn't raising taxes on prepared food and drink under $4 (meaning a cake that costs $3.99 is exempt) but full HST will be charged on snacks and restaurant meals over $4, even if they do include a piece of cake.
Here in B.C., HST is pretty much tracking what we paid GST on in terms of food items, so we're now paying HST on all restaurant meals, all snack foods like chips and candy (even marshmallows), all sugar-sweetened drinks like pop, and all ready-to-eat, prepared foods - deli cabbage rolls, cheese platters, potato salad - whatever they cost.
As for that wedding cake? It's exempt from HST in B.C. But the wedding dinner and services of the caterer who might have made the wedding cake are not, so fork over the extra 12 per cent.
But when it comes to regular store-bought cake, as they say on the prairies, it's a horse, or a cake, of a different colour. HST will be charged on any nice fat bakery-baked chocolate cake or black forest cake or any kind of pre-made cake, fat, skinny, dripping with icing, whipping cream or otherwise, since they aren't considered regular grocery items like bread is, despite Marie Antoinette's, or whoever it was, protestations to the contrary.
Too bad. So now we'll simply have to find another way of having our cake for less and eating it, too - as in, baking it ourselves.
Cake, from a scientific point of view and otherwise, is a most interesting substance.
"The essence of most cakes is sweetness and richness. A cake is a web of flour, eggs, sugar and butter (or shortening)," writes Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking , "a delicate structure that readily disintegrates in the mouth and fills it with easeful flavour."
Ease us on, oh mighty cakes, from our HST woes and otherwise.
McGee goes on to point out that cakes often contain more sugar and fat than flour, and even at that often serve as bases for ever more sweeter and richer embellishments such as custards, creams, icings, jams, chocolate and liqueurs.
Traditional cakes, says McGee, which served most of the western world up to the 20th century, were not nearly as sweet as our cakes today. Plus they were a heck of a lot more work to make.
They were typified by the English pound cake and French quatre quarts or four quarters. Both of these kinds of cakes are made up of equal weights of the four major ingredients: flour and eggs, which tend to build up the web-like structure of cake, and butter and sugar, which weaken it.
Pound cakes were so named for the pound of butter you had to beat until it was a fine thick cream, the dozen eggs and the pound each of flour and sugar that were beaten in for another hour by hand to add the fine air bubbles needed to leaven such dense cakes.
Lord knows everyone, at least kitchen cooks and bakers and dedicated cake eaters, were much happier with several cake-friendly though not necessarily health-friendly innovations in the 20th century.
For one, liquid vegetable fats were hydrogenated. This allowed manufacturers to produce specialized shortening ideal for incorporating air bubbles quickly at room temperature. Specialized cake flour was also invented - soft low-protein flour that is finely milled and strongly bleached with chlorine dioxide or chlorine gas (!) which causes the starch granules to absorb water and swell up more readily, kicking off a chain reaction with the fats and sugar that helps create more quickly and easily that web-like structure so vital for nice "light" cakes.
On top of all this - the icing on the cake, as it were - just after World War II we clever humans invented double-acting baking powders that allowed food manufacturers to make, among other things, "high-ratio" store-bought cake mixes, wherein sugar can outweigh the flour by as much as 40 per cent.
Again, good for cake bakers, but pretty bad in the health and even flavour department - yes, even for a cake and sweets lover such as myself there can be such a thing as too much sugar.
So where does that leave us? Back in the bake-your-own department.
Sure, you can go hog-wild and create an elaborate, architecturally-engineered celebration of sugar, butter, flour and eggs like the 33-metre one made for a mall in Indonesia last Christmas, but whipping up your own cake can also be pretty simple and satisfying, especially when it's time to eat it!
Here's a classic from Whistler Museum & Archives' Whistler Recipes , this from Lizzie Neiland, an Alta Lake pioneer who lived here in the 1920s, a time when cake flour was unheard of and Google was anything but a search engine.
If you don't have apricot jam, head up to Lillooet on July 24 for the apricot festival. I'm sure you'll find some pretty good stuff.
Barney Google Cake
1 ½ c. flour
½ c. butter
1 egg, beaten
1 tbsp. milk
¾ c. apricot jam
Topping:
¼ c. butter, melted
¾ c. sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 c. coconut
1 tsp. vanilla
Mix flour, butter, egg and milk. Put mixture into a greased 10 x 6-inch pan. Cover with apricot jam. Mix ingredients together for the topping. Spread mixture over top of the jam layer. Bake 30 minutes in a moderate 350° oven. Leave in pan until cooled then cut into squares.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who can whip up a Kona banana cake in 15 minutes.
