All Cakes Considered

Last weekend we were at a bookstore, looking for the newest "How to Train Your Dragon" book for Nick, and I naturally gravitated to the cookbooks, to see what cake and dessert books there were.  I was attracted to a title called "All Cakes Considered," which is the cookbook of NPR's All Things Considered producer Melissa Gray.  (It has a great subtitle - How to keep your co-worker happy, friendly, and fatter than you!)

Apparently, over the course of a year, she brought a cake to work each Monday morning for her co-workers.  I couldn't believe what I was reading...there was someone else as compulsive as I.  Except her project seemed much more charitable than mine.  I didn't start out to make cake for others.  Well, no reason to dwell on that part.  What was important was that I had found my people.  Or at least, my person. 

When I got home I looked up more information, and immediately found this story on the NPR website:

October 2009 Story about Cookbook release

It gives a recipe from the cookbook and talks about her pleasure in sharing her cakes with her co-workers who are universally buoyed by the childhood dessert.

At the bottom there's a link to an earlier NPR piece that gave me more nitty-gritty details about her process:

October 2006 Story about "The Cake Lady"

Here Melissa Gray, in her own voice, describes her weekly cake making, "Every week, I bake a new cake for my colleagues. Why cake? Because cookies are too juvenile. Why Monday? Because no matter how much you love your job, Monday is the day you look forward to least. A slice of cake makes it better."

She mentions that the cakes started coming to work with her because she was attempting to revive the family tradition of cake making that had gone by the wayside as her elder family members adopted low-fat and low-carb diets, and her husband was not much of a cake eater.  Nothing to do but bring the cake to her co-workers.  She also lists the guidelines for "The Cake Project":

"The rules are simple: a different recipe every Monday. No repeats. No mixes. No canned frosting. No margarine, no low-fat sour cream, no faux sugar. If a cake bombs, I rework the recipe and do a "re-cake" later in the week. Recipes can come from any source: family, neighbors, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, the food network and those spiral-bound collections that church ladies put out in every community."

Yikes, a re-cake?  I'm not sure I can do that.  Once my work week starts, I can't really commit to making another, better cake, can I?

She also lists the lessons she had learned in almost a year of baking, like eggs and dairy should be at room temperature; and measure precisely and follow recipes as written.  That's good stuff for beginning bakers.

And then it gives four more of her recipes, including the one that started Gray on her cake odyssey - Martha Washington's Great Cake, a cake with fruits, nuts, spices, wine, and brandy (yum!). 

It was super exciting to learn that someone else had done this already, and I'm looking forward to reading the cookbook.  I have a kindred spirit in the land of baking.