\nAt Patisserie Valerie, cake is at the core of everything we do; delicious cakes that form the perfect centerpieces of family celebrations. Catherine Newman, author of recently published \u2018We All Want Impossible Things\u2019 has kindly written an exclusive piece for Patisserie Valerie customers about the importance of cake to her. To find out more about \u2018We All Want Impossible Things\u2019, click\u00a0here.Cake is at the center of our lives. Flip through your photo albums and tell me I\u2019m wrong! The bright-eyed baby with the one single candle\u2014and that same baby, one second later, spackled with chocolate. The birthday cake with maybe not quite enough icing roses to go around, all jealous eyes on the wish-making candle-blower. Those various configurations of brides and grooms pressing white-iced slabs into each other\u2019s faces with newly vowed commitment. A pregnant belly-shaped cake at the baby shower, held together with buttercream because you baked it in an imperfectly greased bowl and it fell into inauspicious pieces when you unmolded it. Cakes at parties, cakes at picnics, cakes at school and home and the office, cakes at funerals even\u2014although you tastefully did not photograph those.If you have a box or folder of favorite recipes, I\u2019m guessing at least half of them are cake. Auntie Ida\u2019s Lemon Drizzle. Strawberry Poke Cake (Grandma). Sahar\u2019s Orange Olive Oil Loaf. Even a Battenberg torn from the newspaper, with a note scrawled in your irritable handwriting: \u201cV. difficult. Better to just buy.\u201d I used to bake my kids a \u201cYay! It\u2019s Wednesday!\u201d cake, just to get them over their midweek blahs. If my grown son comes home for a visit in August, I bake him a plum cake. When my daughter had to stop eating gluten, the very first thing I learned to bake with almond flour was cake.My best friend died in hospice, and what she most wanted\u2014besides life itself\u2014was cake. A particular cake she\u2019d tasted once, twenty years earlier, and then never again. It imprinted itself so deliciously in her memory that, long before she was ill, the two of us had scoured the library and internet for a recipe that might approximate it. Nothing did, though I have dozens of emails in my saved folder: \u201cAlmost,\u201d we wrote each other, or \u201cNot quite.\u201d We finally hunted it down for her, in her last days, and\u2014well. I won\u2019t spoil it. Read We All Want Impossible Things. It\u2019s fiction, yes, but the cake is real. The loss is.I don\u2019t mean to sound so \u201cLet them eat cake!\u201d about life and its deepest griefs. (\u201cThank you, Marie Antoinette!\u201d as my kids would say, if they knew who Marie Antoinette was.) But isn\u2019t this comfort at its finest? The way we show up with a still-warm Bundt or an iced loaf or a heavy bakery box. The way we mean I love you to the moon and stars forever and ever but what we say is: \u201cHere\u2014have a bite of something sweet.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At Patisserie Valerie, cake is at the core of everything we do; delicious cakes that form the perfect centerpieces of family celebrations. Catherine Newman, author of recently published \u2018We All Want Impossible Things\u2019 has kindly written an exclusive piece for Patisserie Valerie customers about the importance of cake to her. To find out more about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":795,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-794","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-snacks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sanabaking.snipsglow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}