Let Them Eat Cake!

Have you ever heard Bill Cosby do his bit about cake? His wife makes him get up one morning to feed the children breakfast and he decides to give them chocolate cake. Cake has eggs, and eggs are good. Cake has milk, and milk is good. Cake has wheat, and wheat is good. Cake, therefore, is good!

The picture above was taken right before the cake was served at Sydney's christening party. I told the kids that they had to go outside if they wanted cake and there was a rush for the door as if someone had shouted "Fire!" in a crowded theater.

What is it about cake? No one moved that fast for the hummus or the taboule or the fresh veggies. No one even looked up when I said that the fruit was served. But whisper the word dessert and you have madness.

I don't mind that my son loves cake. His grandmother bakes the kind of cake that makes the angels sing. You want to spend quality time with it - you want to wear pants with an elastic waistband and bring a tall glass of cold milk. It's for special occassions that Julie breaks out the pans and goes to town on a masterpiece, a work of edible art, as it were. Ben has already made his request for his birthday cake in January and we are already excited at the thought of it.

It's okay to celebrate - it's okay to eat cake. Nobody became obese from one piece of cake. The trick is the one piece. A normal sized piece of cake can be tricky. Eating a balanced meal before the cake is important. You want to save room for cake but just enough room - not too much room. And you must not eat cake and then lie down. Once the sugar hit the kids they ran and jumped and yelled until they crashed. They worked OFF the cake. By the end of the day, it was gone - burned off and burned up. Kids can do that without too much effort. They don't have to schedule an extra hour at the gym or walk ten miles. Maybe that's the secret...a game of freeze tag, racing to the front door, jumping on the furniture and dancing wildly to the music. There is a line that says "Nothing tastes as good as thin feels." The person who coined that phrase clearly never had Julie's cake.