Many Things Are (But Not Everything Is) Cake
A few weeks ago, my colleague celebrated a birthday. Here’s how it works at our office: When it’s your birthday, you bring a treat. You send a terse email, something like, “Donuts downstairs - enjoy.” From that message, everyone knows that the person who unleashed the company-wide sugar rush is celebrating a birthday. Naturally, we all love to indulge in saturated fats, but let’s not make a big deal about it, okay?
Not so with sales and marketing, because we simply can’t help but make a whole damn deal out of every moment. We need to express our creativity and style, or our bodies shatter like a demolition implosion. It can get messy. Lots of crying. Trust me. You don’t want that. So, we draw names from a hat, and then we bring a treat to celebrate our coworker.
I have always embraced my creativity as a significant part of my identity. When my neighbor and I formed a band at age 10, I insisted on writing original songs, even though I had no clue I was actually stealing melodies from John Williams and Barry Manilow. I had to make my own birthday cards for my family, none of that Hallmark garbage. I had a driving desire to create. Of course, when I discovered Monty Python, I thought, I could write my own sketches.
A decade would pass before I could write anything one tenth as funny as The Spanish Inquisition (which, in case you’ve forgotten, no one expects). For whatever reason, I had to create something new. All the time.
I didn’t realize that you couldn’t simply spit it out once, and it people would clamor to enjoy my creation. It took many years for me to embrace the creative process of writing, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting... eventually polishing to get the kind of quality I admired in others.
For this reason, I wound up with this cake, a child’s crayon drawing come to life. I took several risks in making this cake for my colleague’s birthday.
Home-made Keto recipe.
Inspiration of the 2020 Everything is Cake trend.
Fondant.
I wanted to make this device, my company’s latest innovation for emergency notification in schools and hospitals. It’s a speaker with an LCD, powered by the Ethernet cable. Or, in my case, a brick of chocolate and Erythritol.
This mo-fo came out of the pan like a concrete hammer. I thought, this can’t possibly be cake. But, that wasn’t the point any more, was it? I needed to make it look like a steel covered electronics device that tells you where to run and hide during a tornado.
I still have that desire to get the audience reaction, and my colleagues appreciated the spirit of my efforts, not dinging my score for the moist-less sponge-coal results. In fact, I got bonus points for making a cake as durable, sturdy, and steel-like as the device that inspired it. I had a vision, and I took a stab at working through the process to a finished product.
The process reminded me very much of my writing. I start with a notion of a vision. I string words together. I push myself to get to an conclusion of some sort. Then, I evaluate. Rinse and repeat. If I really enjoyed making cakes, I would probably make ten cakes until it looked much more like the real thing. In this case, I’d much rather spend my time writing this story.
Thanks for tasting my word-cake. I look forward to seeing you return for a second helping.
