After witnessing a particularly awkward/seething with rage wedding ceremony, I found myself thinking “At least the cake will be good.  I could really go for a tasty little slice right about now.” The cake was a small three-tiered affair with white icing and blue accents.  It wasn’t beautiful, nor was it hideous.  It looked like it would hit the spot just fine.

I sat down and took a forkful of cake.  As I lifted it to my mouth, I had my reservations because it was an odd color.  Really there are only three acceptable cake colors: white, yellow, and dark brown.  The only exception to this is Funfetti cake, which is white with happy sprinkles embedded like delicious little treasures.

This cake was sort of beige-ish, almost the color of spice cake.  I don’t care for spice cake.  Why would you make spice cake when chocolate cake mix is readily available?  It’s a mystery worth pondering another time.  But it’s hard to totally mess up cake, so I took a bite.  It tasted like…it tasted like…it didn’t taste like any food product I’d ever eaten.  It looked like cake.  It felt like cake.  But that’s where the similarities ended.

I couldn’t put my finger on what flavor it was and so assuming I’d gotten an off bite, I took a second bite.  It was just as awful, maybe even more so because now I had impostor cake in my belly and my mouth and, let me tell you, neither location was pleased.  Had I been at home or even in a restaurant or anywhere but in the direct line of sight of the cake baker, I would have spit it out right onto the silvery names monogrammed on the napkin.  As this was not an option, I swallowed it and chased it with three cups of strawberry lemonade.

The weird thing was nobody else at the table could identify the cake flavor either.  I looked around the room and saw people pushing cake around on their plates to give the appearance they’d eaten it.  I felt terrible for having handed out such a poor excuse for a cake.  These people didn’t do anything to deserve that.  Okay, maybe some of them did, but as a whole this crowd was being severely punished.  With cake.

It reminded me of a scene from Better Off Ted.  Two scientists have created a meatless beef product and it’s up to the taste tester to determine exactly what it is.  The scene went something like this:

“It tastes familiar.”

“Like beef?”

“No.”

“Like chicken?”

“No.  It tastes like…it tastes like…despair.  Yes, that’s it.  Despair.”

I never did figure out what flavor this wedding cake was supposed to be, but it was a dead ringer for despair.