Illustrations by Emma Gerigscott
I would be skipping my birthdays altogether if it weren’t for the cake. After all, what other time of the year lets us eat as much cake as we want without feeling guilty—OK, maybe less guilty?
So now that the last crumbs of this year’s birthday cake have been consumed, I decided to do a little research into how cakes came to be an important part of our celebrations for everything from graduations to weddings.
It turns out the Greeks started the whole thing when they baked a crescent-shaped cake and loaded it with candles in honor of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and moon, according to Bethanne Patrick and John Thompson in their book An Uncommon History of Common Things (National Geographic, 2009). Wedding cakes also date back to ancient times, but were rather boringly made of wheat or barley with no frosting at all.
Thank goodness for the 21st century, where in Michiana we have a wonderful selection of cakes for all types of big events.
Elizabeth Van Herk’s first baking memories date back to when she was around 6 and making brownies and cookies with her mom.
Now the owner of Delizious Bakery in Plymouth, IN, Van Herk says she uses only the highest-quality ingredients to make such specialty items as custom-decorated cakes and sugar cookies, dog-friendly Pupcakes and first-birthday smash cakes. She also offers 70 flavors of from-scratch cupcakes and a wide variety of gourmet cookies and brownies, many of which she sells at the Plymouth Farmers Market.
Hopkins says she makes so many cakes that she dreams about them at night, but that’s no problem.
“I love to eat my own sweets,” she says.
“What’s so awesome about cake is that it’s versatile,” Kelsey Morgan, self-described Martha Stewart addict and pastry chef at the Whistle Stop in Union Pier, MI, tells me as I taste her wonderful Endless Chocolate Cake, a seven-layer chocolate confection. “Cakes are so nostalgic but they also have the potential to be so surprising. They remind you of your birthday when you’re 12 but also can be so much more.”
Morgan, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in New York, previously worked with James Beard Award–winning chef Mindy Segal at Mindy’s HotChocolate, Segal’s restaurant in Chicago, where Segal helped her hone her baking skills. While there she also worked closely with chef Eva Frahm.
“I’d just a put in notice there and was going to Seattle,” Morgan says. But Frahm had taken the job as chef at the Whistle Stop, and while Morgan was hiking in the dunes of Southwest Michigan, Frahm persuaded her to come work with her.
Morgan says she’s always re-imagining cakes and prefers to make seven layers or more of cake, filling and frosting. She can take something like fresh Michigan blueberries and turn them into a blueberry pancake cake—a buttermilk batter with a brown butter custard filling and maple buttercream frosting.
“Then you pour Burton’s Maplewood Farm Bourbon Maple Syrup on it at the table,” she says, noting that Segal is a friend of Tim Burton, who owns Maplewood Farm in the tiny town of Medora in southern Indiana. Segal uses his syrup at her restaurant.
Summer strawberries inspired Morgan’s Strawberry Lemonade Cake—baked buttermilk sheets soaked in freshly made strawberry lemonade and topped with strawberry buttercream.
Each of her cakes is personal for Morgan.
“These cakes are like my babies,” she says. “That’s what I love to do.”
Delizious Bakery
10702 SR 17
Plymouth, IN
earelos.wix.com/delizious-bakery-1
C’est La Vie Cakes
52832 Hill Trail
South Bend, IN
cestlaviecakes.com
Whistle Stop
15700 Red Arrow Hwy.
Union Pier, MI
whistlestopgrocery.com
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