A drawn cake is an imaginary transgression.
“A party without cake is just a meeting.”
Says Julia Child, the great chef who has entered the collective imagination of Americans and beyond.
In fact, the dessert is decisive in every celebration, but also on the weekend table or on any evening of our lives, when we return home tired from work and we need something to cheer us up.
A cake is consolatory.
A cookie breaks the afternoon hunger or gives us energy in the morning at breakfast.
A slice of cake concludes a hasty dinner maybe even spartan and makes it magically a perfect evening.
A sponge cake is the ideal baby cot where we can put all our worries to send them down without guilt to the rhythm of blissful smiles.
A cake is a wonderful gift if we are invited to dinner.
And if we invite someone, it is a gesture of deep friendship because the guest tells us that she/he wants to share something special with us.
Dessert is part of our daily mood.
It is not just a matter of sugar, it is something more complex.
A slice of cake reminds us of childhood. The preparation of the ingredients, maybe at grandma’s house while she was mixing sugar and eggs, flour and butter and we were there to watch and learn. In silence, our grandmother taught us patience, concentration, the order of the ingredients, waiting for the leavening and then the baking.
Many complex passages become natural and linear in a simple cake.
Maybe we learned to live with some rules even observing who made a cake: the grandmother, the aunt, our mother. Those reference figures that taught us to move in the world.
In my case, my father made the cakes and I observed all the steps talking to him.
These are moments that I will never forget and that I understand only today how much they taught me.
A lesson of life, patience and complicity.
And of love between father and daughter.
Because let’s tell the truth: we associate to the cake any beautiful thought of childhood.
We hardly associate the sweet with something bad or negative.
For example, I remember the special Sunday mornings, when I used to walk in the city center with my father and we would go to buy some delicious desserts for lunch with my brother, my mother and my grandparents.
When we were distributing the desserts at the table after lunch, we would draw cheerful smiles on our faces.
It didn’t matter if someone had to go back to work, to do their schoolwork, they had to leave.
At the moment of dessert the world stopped and we all entered a state of timeless bliss.
What power have vanilla, chocolate, candied fruit, sugar, creams!
Sweets are a form of meditation, a patch on the skin, a smile on a dark day.
When cakes suggest the word diet.
Eating sweets moderately and moving around should not start any diet, especially if the cakes are made with healthy and genuine ingredients.
However, the risk of getting fat is always around the corner.
In my case when it is very hot, I can hardly ever eat sweets. My stomach closes definitively waiting for autumn.
Luckily we don’t have any special family anniversaries during the summer, but in the case we make up for it with an excellent homemade ice cream with rice milk (some members of the family, including myself, must avoid milk and all its derivatives).
But when the first fresh September begins, I start cooking sweets again as my father used to do.
What do I do in the meantime if I don’t bake sweets?
Of course, I draw them!
The imaginary transgression of sweets.
Yes, there is a way to transgress with the diet and it is very simple, and that’s what I’m doing in these still hot days of August: drawing sweets.
I love to draw sweets, pastries, cookies, cakes.
I like to imagine tables set with special shapes of cakes. And then imagine these tables inside houses that smell of creams, chocolate, vanilla, strawberry syrup.
It makes me hungry to even imagine all these ingredients.
Draw sweets for every event.
So in the cool evening, after a hot summer day, I take watercolors and pencils and pens with black ink and drawing.
I created heart-shaped Valentine’s Day cakes, sponge cake to celebrate delicious little children’s birthdays, wedding cakes full of cream and flowers, Halloween cakes with sugar bones.
I also designed cakes for a wedding invitation for a couple in Hong Kong a few years ago.
And then cakes with strawberry and cherry icing, with marzipan hearts (will someone be engaged? Or will it be the usual Valentine’s Day?) or very romantic spring cakes with violets and colored in soft lilac and light purple.
I also designed two cakes for the bride and groom and left them in black and white to color as you want.
Happy cakes in e-book.
What have I done with all these sweets?
I put them in drawers for months, because every summer I drew some of them.
Then days ago I put all these cake designs together and created an e-book just of cakes.
I thought they could be printed to hang them in the kitchen, like little sugar paintings.
Or by cutting out the shapes you can make greeting cards, tags for jam jars, or to decorate wrapping paper.
Also to make collages, to entertain children.
These cakes are perfect for inventing stories with the other e-book of paper dolls that you can always find on the site.
There are millions of reasons to download these cakes.
- Diet while eating them with your eyes
- You will return children
- You will meditate by cutting out and pasting the drawings
- You will savor the beauty of the past
- You will find creative ways to use them
- You will spend your time with something really beautiful
- You invent wonderful gifts for your friends
The art of cooking, and in this case the art of desserts, is a little like life.
Mixing all the ingredients in the right doses, can give birth to an excellent dessert. So also in life.
But just one ingredient more or less, one mistake in cooking, and everything changes.
We must live by eating everything with our eyes.
And I hope that my cakes will make your life more happy, more full of human warmth and fun.
If you create something let me see it, write to me.
