Culture

Chelsea Peretti’s Bizarre Way Of Eating Cake Is Completely Correct

Cake frosting is a scam.

by Patrick Lenton  18 September 2018
frosting

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Chelsea Peretti is a lot of things — one of the world’s finest comedians, an actor on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, a comedy writer with credits like Parks and Recreation: but most importantly, she’s someone who speaks truth to power. And she doesn’t flinch from placing the most sacrosanct, holy and untouchable subjects within her satirical sights: such as the fact that cake frosting is garbage.

Recently, Peretti broke the internet by tweeting a picture of how she eats cake, which shows the discarded husk of a mutilated slice of chocolate cake, with all the frosting scrupulously avoided. She added the comment “not that into frosting”.

Having Your Cake And Eating It Too

Naturally, everyone freaked the fuck out. People love cakes! Cakes are the thing you eat at weddings, at birthdays, at Christmas, at baptisms (I assume).

They are emblematic of celebration, of luxury and decadence. In olden times, when everyone lived in cabins in the mountains, you stopped gnawing on old haunches of deer for only one day a year, and what you ate on that day was a cake. And then you probably died two days later because life expectancy was awful!

Cakes are kinda given an iconic status. In Matilda (1996), the Trunchbull uses a thick chocolate cake as a bait for greedy children, and as her own personal weakness, her indulgence. Yet, is she not a perfect example of an almost irredeemable monster? Should we not equate the confectionary choice of a monstrous human being as monstrous then by association?

Or how about the plotline from the excellent comedy-drama United States of Tara, where Brie Larson’s character earns money from gross fetish boys by sitting on cakes. Cakes have such an established, almost unconsciously privileged place in our society that the disruption, the decimation of them has been perverted into a sexual act.

Cakes are important. Or so we’re meant to think.

The Frosting Rebellion

But here’s the thing — while the powerful majority were quick to deride and attempt to silence Peretti, her honesty was a beacon for a surprising amount of fellow frosting haters. Finally, people who felt voiceless and unimportant were given the permission to speak up. The silenced were given a rallying cry — and their response was powerful.

Finally, we’re allowed to actually acknowledge that cake frosting is the worst part of a cake. It’s 2018 — we don’t need to eat this garbage. We can easily have a sleek and sultry tart or a cake without frosting. We could have a cheesecake, the best cake in the world, which entirely boycotts icing.

For too long, the presence of icing has been something we’re just meant to deal with. I say no longer. I say let’s just let cake be cake — not covered in overly sweet whipped nonsense.

Isn’t a truly good cake able to stand alone in terms of flavour without a bunch of oily sugar on top?

The Cake Throughout History

Basically, according to my research, cakes are just bread that put on airs.

Bread was very important in ancient cultures, and eventually the rich decided to get fancy with it, and add honey and sugars and spices and have tastier bread that’s worse for you. That’s where cakes come from.

But — frosting, (or icing) is a whole different barrel of fish.

The generic cake as we know it today, with its lashings of sugary cream, is just a cynical marketing ploy, designed literally to give bored housewives something to do.

Apparently, during the Great Depression, there was a surplus of molasses and the need to provide easily made food to millions of economically depressed people in the United States. One company patented a cake-bread mix in order to deal with this economic situation, and thereby established the first line of cake in a box. In so doing, cake, as it is known today, became a mass-produced good rather than a home or bakery-made specialty.

Then, later, according to this article, things changed:

“When sales dropped heavily in the 1950s, marketers discovered that the cake in a box rendered the cake-making function of housewives relatively dispiriting. This was a time when women, retired from the war-time labour force, and in a critical ideological period in American history, were confined to the domestic sphere and oriented towards the freshly blossoming consumerism in the US.  In order to compensate for this situation, the marketing psychologist Ernest Dichter ushered in the solution to the cake mix problem: frosting. Since making the cake was so simple, housewives and other in-home cake makers could expend their creative energy on cake decorating inspired by, among other things, photographs in magazines of elaborately decorated cakes.”

That’s right — FROSTING IS A GIANT SCAM designed to waste women’s time and keep them busy so they stop worrying about the patriarchy. I’m blowing this whole icing fraud wide open!

“Ever since, cake in a box has become a staple of supermarkets, and is complemented with frosting in a can.”

Saying Goodbye To Frosting Is No Cakewalk

We should consider the famous episode of Seinfeld ‘The Frogger’, in which Elaine literally calls in sick after being faced with TWO different occasions of cake at work, annoyed at the forced obligation of both eating it and socialising. When she returns to work, she discovers that she is so addicted to the 4pm sugar rush, that she wants more. This forces her to eat an antique cake, which has ramifications.

That is our society — we are all Elaine, craving the cake that we don’t really want, desperately trying to ignore the ramifications.

If anything, maybe we should be questioning the kind of default status that a cake has in our lives. Perhaps when I have my birthday, I don’t want a cake — I want a pile of rare fruits. Maybe I want a cured ham. Maybe I want the smell of old flowers. I don’t know!

The point is we should be challenging the frosting cake market, disrupting it. Elon Musk needs to get into baking and launch all the frosting in the world into the goddamn sun.

I’m just so goddamn glad I don’t have to worry about being labelled a monster anymore for saying no to cake frosting.

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Patrick Lenton is an author and staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.