Comfort Food: Schrödinger's Cake

Photograph by blueee/Shutterstock Images.

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One night in July I had a small barbecue on the roof of my building, and my closest friends came and brought things I had requested, specifically booze and a red velvet cake from a bakery I like in Brooklyn. I provided the meat. As the night progressed, the red velvet cake remained untouched, while the booze became the focal point of the evening. The next day I woke with absolutely no hangover whatsoever and a gigantic cake box in my refrigerator.

I knew that I would never eat it myself, and the fact that it would remain untouched pained me greatly, as we all know it is a holy sin to waste food, one for which every dead relative of mine, dating back to ones who did some serious shtetl time, would roll over in their grave.

But then I remembered that my friend Ellen was having a birthday party that night. It was to be a low-key event at a dive bar near her house. I asked her if she wanted me to bring the cake so that people would have something to snack on. She told me to bring it, and thanked me.

“It was nothing,” I said. “I didn’t even buy it myself.”

Ellen and I were good friends, but not great friends. We had known each other for a few years, and had probably gone as far as we were going to go in developing our friendship. We had worked together once on a project, and since then mainly socialized at parties and occasionally instant-messaged. I liked her a lot, but she was about to be married and had a vast network of girlfriends that pre-dated our meeting. She was full-up.

We weren’t going to be best friends, is what I am trying to say.

So I doubt I would have actually gone out and bought her a cake. It’s not like I would not buy her a cake. I liked her plenty. But I was pretty sure there was someone else on the planet for whom cake-buying for Ellen was a more appropriate responsibility. But cake regifting. That I could do.

I arrived at the bar early with the cake, and felt awkward and presumptuous when I walked in with my big white box. The bartender, an older woman, kind and gruff and clearly an original in the sea of overeducated, white-toothed waitstaff that populated the rest of the neighborhood establishments, was delighted to see that there was a cake, because that meant a party.

She immediately became professional with me. (Oh, how many cake boxes had she seen over the years?)

“Do you have candles?” she said.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said. “I just thought we could leave it out and people could eat it.”

I hadn’t intended to make this into a whole singing-candle-blowing-out event. I just didn’t want to waste the food.

But she insisted upon putting it in the freezer so that it could be a surprise.

When Ellen arrived a few minutes later with her fiance, the bartender greeted her with a hug and said, “Wait, are you the birthday girl?”

Ellen, as it turned out, was a much-loved regular. The bartender stared at me and Ellen’s fiance. How were there not candles involved? This was Ellen’s birthday!

“She doesn’t want a big deal, does she?” I said to him. “She’s not a candles girl, right?” He shrugged. He had clearly thought the same as me, that it would be a casual night.

But the bartender would not have it. She shoved some money in his hand, and sent him trotting off to a deli. He came back with bags of potato chips, which the bartender dispensed in small wooden bowls around the bar, and a box of birthday candles, which he put in front of me wordlessly, and then looked away, as if to say: You wanted a cake, now you got it.

As the party became more crowded the responsibility of the cake weighed me down. When was the appropriate time to bring it out? How would I know when the party had reached its maximum capacity? This was now officially best-friend-level kind of stuff, bringing a cake to a party and lighting the candles and sharing the blowing-out-the-candles spotlight. I felt like a huge phony. It wasn’t like I had planned it in advance or anything. Not like I was sitting around thinking, “What can I do for Ellen’s birthday to really knock her socks off?” Was Ellen going to think I had deeper feelings for her than she had for me? Did I just completely level-jump our friendship?