Cake : Cake Is for Kids

Cake is a kid dessert. Grown-ups may eat a genoise soaked in liqueur-spiked syrup, or a multilayered torte, the cake sandwiched between more sophisticated layers of nuts or fruit. But real cake--classic birthday cake, two symmetrical layers sealed by an internal half inch of edible adhesive goo and slathered, side and top, with frosting--is an early-years kind of treat.

To really enjoy it, you have to be willing to fight for that corner slice, the one with an extra plane of frosting. You have to be able to climb over your pals to point to the frosting rose you absolutely have to have. You have to be ready to stroll past the cake and cop a glob of frosting even if other people are watching. It’s difficult to pull that off once you get past 10.

We feed our children cake even as we ban other, more mundane sweets--soda pop, candy, endless cookies. Cake is ritual. I doubt many kids would believe they’d gotten a year older if they didn’t have the cake to prove it. Maybe we eat that one adult cake--the wedding cake--because it summons up memories of childhood, when marking the passage of time was a pure, sweet pleasure and mortality was something that happened only to bad guys in fairy tales.

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But by the time we’re adults, our taste buds have changed. It’s difficult to judge a good birthday cake. The best critics are those who are immersed in cake heit , children who can hardly go a month without a slice. So I structured a blind-tasting for a panel of experts: My 5-year-old daughter Sarah and her chums since her toddler days--Ellie, Julia, Natasha and Kelsey. Natasha’s 2 1/2-year-old sister, Charlotte, provided the newcomer’s enthusiasm; Kelsey’s 9-year-old sister, Katy, the sophisticated palate. Combined, the kids brought to the table 31 1/2 years of intensive experience on the birthday circuit, and quite definite preferences.

Sarah refuses chocolate the way some kids reject spinach. Julia has never met a piece of chocolate she didn’t like, which might be what cements their considerable friendship. Ellie likes all kinds of cake. Kelsey prefers chocolate but will eat vanilla, and Katy likes lemon. Natasha’s favorite is double strawberry; her sister Charlotte’s is vanilla inside and out.

Clearly, there was enough of a range of prejudice to guarantee a fair trial. In the name of culinary science, though, the parents present gallantly offered to taste as well.

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There were no bakery cakes, the theory being that any pastry with Belle, Princess Jasmine, Ariel or even Simba on it has an unfair advantage. The girls, who got one wedge of plain, unfrosted cake after another, tried, as much as any cake lover can, to distinguish between generalized bliss and individual cake-related happiness. The candidates were:

* The basic genoise from Julia Child’s “How To Cook.”

* The 1-2-3-4 cake from Alice Waters’ “Fanny at Chez Panisse.”

* The all-occasion downy-yellow butter cake from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s “The Cake Bible.”

* The perfect all-American chocolate butter cake from “The Cake Bible.”

* The low-fat chocolate buttermilk cake from Susan Purdy’s “Have Your Cake and Eat It Too.”

* Applesauce cake from Marion Cunningham’s “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.”

* Duncan Hines’ Moist Deluxe Lemon Supreme Flavor cake mix.

Julia Child never stood a chance with this panel, though I noticed that the girls’ parents hovered near the first plate throughout the afternoon. Child’s cake is a flat, dense almond cake with a chewy texture, not at all like the traditional birthday cake--and as such, not a winner. The comments ranged from “yuk” to “tastes like a muffin,” which is nice if you’re serving breakfast but perhaps not the response you want at a party. Three of the girls liked it but didn’t love it. Mostly they wanted to know what was coming next.

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In retrospect, I wonder whether they might have held back because they thought that finding a winner might spell the end of this delicious game.

The next candidate was more familiar: the chocolate cake from “The Cake Bible.” Aside from Sarah, who boycotted this and the next offering, the crowd approved. Julia loved the cake because it was “soft.” Kelsey liked it because it reminded her of a family trip to Hershey, Pa. Ellie liked it because, she said, “it tastes like chocolate and chocolate and chocolate.”

Charlotte held out for vanilla until peer pressure got to her and she tried a single bite, but she still didn’t like it. No matter; her sister Natasha had nothing to say because she was wolfing her first piece so she could ask for another.

Of course, a true critic can distinguish between seemingly identical dishes, and these experts had a different reaction to Susan Purdy’s low-fat chocolate cake. Purdy’s cake is denser and moister, but several of the girls preferred the more austere Beranbaum offering. Julia didn’t even finish her sample. “I don’t like the inside,” she said, “only the outside, because the inside tasted like frosting.”

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Kelsey said she liked the frosting part even though there was none, testament to the cake’s fudgy texture, but rejected it because “the inside tastes like coffee.” I asked her how she know. She shrugged and held fast to her opinion.

Amid a chorus of “What’s next? What’s next?,” we brought out the yellow cakes. The first vanilla cake (so dubbed in our household, where good vanilla is revered the way some worship fine wine) was Alice Waters’ basic cake, designed for and approved by her daughter Fanny. It’s sweet, moist, full of vanilla flavor, just the sort of cake that would get wonderfully gooey, almost liquid, when eaten with frosting, as nature intended.

It seduced the crowd: Julia, despite her love of chocolate, pronounced it her favorite so far. Charlotte quickly held up an empty plate. Ellie loved it. Natasha and Katy liked it because it was sweet, and Sarah proclaimed, “Yum in the tummy.” Only Kelsey rejected it with a terse “Yucky.”

By now an interesting dynamic was at play--what I’ll call the crescendo effect. An afternoon full of cake is a heady notion for a 5-year-old, and here they were in the midst of seemingly endless dessert. It was like a waking dream, and the happiness had a cumulative effect. Each sample was more fun than the one before.

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The next vanilla cake, from “The Cake Bible,” was a drier, more restrained cake, but it had plenty of fans: Kelsey liked this one because it tasted more like vanilla to her. Sarah, Charlotte and Julia preferred it, and only Ellie resisted because it tasted “sour.”

No. 6 was a departure, a spicy, moist applesauce cake studded with raisins and nuts. The girls split evenly. The ones who liked it praised all the things that its detractors complained about--it was full of cinammon and raisins, both of which seem to be deal breakers to the kindergarten set.

No. 7 was a ringer, in a way, a lemon cake made from a supermarket cake mix, the kind of convenience food that true bakers believe can’t possibly taste like the real thing. But veracity isn’t at issue here. It was a daunting revelation to those of us who love the zen exercise of making a cake from scratch: The kids adored the lemon cake. They didn’t care that it had a bouncy texture, or lacked the smoothness of a butter cake. It had a strong, sweet lemon flavor, and everyone liked it.

When I asked for the overall favorite, lemon got five votes and one or the other of the vanilla cakes got two. As a cynic and a baker, I suggested that perhaps momentum had carried the kids away, that in the de-sugared light of dawn they might actually prefer other cakes. I wondered if being served last was the equivalent of the pole position in horseracing. I asked the moms to recheck the voting the next day.

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And in fact--when faced with the question of which leftovers to keep and which ones to give away--Sarah switched back from lemon to Alice Waters’ vanilla. Julia wanted some more chocolate cake. Another girl spoke wistfully of the “Cake Bible” vanilla.

The moral? A good cake is familiar, sweet, smooth, not too dense. And it can, if you’re pressed, come out of a box.

1-2-3-4 CAKE

4 teaspoons baking powder

3 cups cake flour, sifted

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

2 cups sugar

4 eggs, separated

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup milk

In medium work bowl combine baking powder, flour and salt. Mix together.

Beat butter until light and fluffy. Add sugar and beat again until very fluffy and light-yellow. Add egg yolks and beat in briefly. Add 1 teaspoon vanilla and mix well.

Add half of flour and lightly stir in. Add half of milk and lightly stir in. Sift over rest of flour mixture and stir, then add rest of milk and stir.

Beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Add 1/3 whites to batter and gently stir in. Pour remainder of whites over batter and fold in gently.

Divide batter between 2 buttered and floured 8- or 9-inch cake pans. Bake at 350 degrees about 25 minutes or until wood pick inserted in center comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool on rack. Ice cake as desired. Makes about 9 servings.

Each serving, without icing, contains about:

531 calories; 364 mg sodium; 151 mg cholesterol; 23 grams fat; 74 grams carbohydrates; 7 grams protein; 0.07 gram fiber.