The Lopsided Cake

By Anne Marie Furie

When I was a kid we loved to bake cakes. I come from a rather large immediate family – 11 kids – so we baked LOTS of cakes for birthdays! We loved mixing the ingredients, adding eggs and trying not to get it all over the counter, mixing with a hand mixer that was too heavy for us until our arms ached. I liked buttering and flouring the cake pans – obviously this is before the Teflon pans and the non stick sprays!

But the funny think is, no matter who made the cake, no matter what oven shelf we put it on, no matter how we tried to prop it up to be even, the cake always came out lopsided. We never thought to cut the offending part off – why would you cut off part of the cake??? Sacrilege! We were too little too even understand that. We just tried to match up the lopsides together so it wasn’t so obvious – but it was.

And sometimes when we weren’t paying really close attention we would use two different size pans. It made for fun lopsided, ill fitting cakes, but we loved them.

So today when I see “professional” lopsided cakes at special events, it makes me smile. I always wonder if the baker secretly had a childhood filled with wonderful memories based on the lopsided cake. Imagine my delight when my niece Fiona had such a cake at her wedding! Isn’t it just so FUN?! (That’s her cake pictured above – so fun and such a reflection of the couple!)

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