Speaking of Cake...

... (see previous post), last weekend was Ditchie's birthday, and her boss gave her a mocha cake from Hizon's as a birthday present. It was a huge cake. Two dense layers of chocolate chiffon with custard filling in between and a thick layer of butter icing covering the whole thing. It was huge.

Anyway, Ditchie brought home only little more than half of the cake but that was more than enough for me. In fact, there's still some left over even though I've been eating 1 to 2 hefty slices of cake everyday since Friday night. Another co-worker gave Ditchie a Mango Torte from Dulcelin Gourmet, and it was also family size. It's supposed to be kept frozen but it doesn't fit in our freezer. I was going to help it along by, you know, eating some (and by "some" I mean "a whole lot") just to reduce the size so it can fit in our refrigerator's small freezer. Except, I didn't like it much. I'm not a huge fan of mango--which I know is sacrilege for a Filipino to even think, let alone articulate--but I really can't get behind it. I like green mangoes (the indian variety) with alamang and dried mangoes as well but, the truth is, my tongue doesn't generally like interacting with mangoes. It likes to keep its distance from kind of cloying fruits. So I ate maybe a couple of slices of the torte, mostly because I liked the crust and the cream, but I removed the huge slices of ripe mango and put them on Ditchie's plate. She can have the whole torte, for all I care. I just don't like mango.

But back to that Hizon's cake. It actually isn't all that phenomenal. I still prefer Estrel's caramel cake (which Ditchie doesn't like. Oh well, whatever ices your chiffon.), although, frankly, from stories I've heard from Ate My and also a friend of mine, Estrel's service leaves much to be desired. Appartently, the people in that not-so-cult-anymore bakeshop sometimes have an air of haughtiness around them, so arrogant just because people virtually line up to buy and eat their cake. Which reminds me of the French during Marie Antoinette's ignoble reign. Except, of course, they didn't actually have money to buy and eat cake and were, in fact, being thrown scraps. So I don't really know why I remembered that.

Anyway, the point is that Hizon's mocha cake, tastewise, isn't really rocking. But I've been eating blocks of it. And yesterday, I went 5 hours without eating anything after I ate cake. Which made me realize why I love cake. I love cake because it fills you up and leaves no space for anything else. You eat cake and you're set--at least until the next meal. You don't get this feeling that you should have something else, something to finish up the meal you just had, like a small piece of Max's caramel bar. Cake is appetizer, entree, and dessert, all in one. It doesn't even have to be tasty. It just has to be cake, just two layers of chiffon, preferably with custard in between, and loads of icing.

Maybe Marie Antoinette was onto something when she said, let them eat cake.