The fundamentals of kitsch as applied to cake (kitsch corner #2)
Alchemy is the process of taking something ordinary and turning it into something extraordinary. I think of this every time I gaze upon the rather ordinary cinnamon-apple sponge that lies at the heart of this rather extraordinary Kylie Minogue ‘Showgirl’ cake in the book ‘Bake Australia Great’.
The birth of every cake is magical in its alchemy We take the equivalent of lead in the form of everyday ingredients (butter, eggs, flour, and sugar), bake the resulting concoction in an oven and what emerges is a golden something that is not remotely like the sum of its parts. Prepare and cook a meat or vegetable stew, an escabeche, biryani or a pad Thai, stare into the pot or at the plate and you will see its guts in a manner of speaking. We cannot really say the same about cake. We understand the chemistry of baking on an intellectual level but its transcendent nature can still thrill.
All cakes are showgirls and showboys at heart. We open the oven door and there they are, kicking and prancing their way onto the cooling racks, no matter how rustic their appearance. Cakes even sing as they cook, stopping only to receive our applause as we remove them from the oven.
We decorate our cakes throwing boas and flowers and all things shiny and glittery their way or we go the rustic route, trailing wicker, linen and earthenware in our wake. We set a scene and gather around The Cake, our mouths shaped into perfect ‘O’s’ of wonder at something that has managed to transcend the everyday drudgery of Getting People Fed, or as Ayşegül Ergül wrote, “the means through which we beautify ourselves within the disenchanted world of things,” which is as good a description of kitsch as any.
A couple of years ago, I was wandering around a supermarket in New Orleans’ Central Business District after gorging myself at Willa Jean. Along the back wall ran a giant counter piled high with ready-made cakes: immoderate Doberge tortes; primary bright tres leches caged in plastic bubbles; and full and half sheet cakes decorated with the American flag, sugar crawfish or giant neon fleur-de-lis (the symbol of Louisiana). There were rows of billowing gateaux of all kinds: the almond berry Gentilly lace, and a clutch of champagne blush layer cakes as prettily pink as Julia Roberts’ wedding day in ‘Steel Magnolias’. The six-layer, chocolate pudding-filled Doberges, and bananas foster layer cakes would not have looked out of place on the set of Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ Trays of cupcakes sat next to giant pouffy versions made to serve eight, and heaven met with earth in the form of cookie cakes: their field-brown crumb was edged with clouds of frosting.
The entire counter ran the gamut of the city’s history. New Orleans is a place founded by France, then ruled over for 40 years by the Spanish before being bought by the United States in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. There was the entwining of Mexico and France via Cinco de Mayo in cake form, a date that commemorates the Mexican Army's victory over the French at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1802. Tres leches is a cake popular with the Mexicans who rushed to help rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina and then decided to stay.
And although less is rarely more when it comes to decorating all of these cakes, I refute the claim that to be kitsch is always to be considered to be in poor taste, or excessively garish, or seen as a sentimental mass-produced series of replacement doodads for people who have lost or have had to leave their folk art behind. Everything has a hinterland and if you look for it, kitsch ceases to be defined by the “unreflective emotional response” its presence is said to engender. There are hidden depths. And this is before we even get to the thorny question of who gets to define what is and what is not kitsch, the impact of colonialism, and its judgements about taste. For this reason, I feel a certain amount of dissonance about my inclusion of tres leches cake as an example of what some people might see as kitsch. Yet there is no doubt that the pale pink and primrose yellow tres leches cakes of my childhood birthdays topped with sugar sculptures of Daisy Duck or characters from Plaza Sésamo possessed many of its qualities. But those cake toppers do tell a story of aesthetic colonisation from Mexico’s neighbour.
Dorfles said kitsch is depicted by culture theorists as a “falsification of art,” because of its sentimental, decontextualised nature and the way appalling objects are transformed and repackaged into something less ghastly. Kitsch personalities imbue difficult objects with kitsch personality. We are an emotionally vulnerable species and we struggle to live alongside ghoulish, frightening things without neutering or sanitising them in some way (ie the Rosemary West cushions and ‘dictator chic’ decorative items I wrote about in Kitsch Corner #1). There’s a German expression ‘etwasverkitschen’ which (roughly translated) suggests that something is shattered when we knock it off [its pedestal] and substitute a denatured replacement for the real thing. This applies to serial killer cakes for sure, but a Kylie one? Do we really need or want to denature her?
Maybe we use kitsch as a form of resistance against commodification and our role within it? Could that be what we are doing when we bake a Kylie cake? And this is why so much of it combines camp, irony and cuteness to calm and amuse us: “I’m not consuming, I am being ironic/worshipful!” It’s one of the reasons why I believe the recent social media trend for realistic cakes is profoundly unsettling and the very opposite of kitsch, even though I have seen these cakes described in this manner. They are a meta- head fuck: a fake consumer good from an era of sped-up consumption made to be cut and consumed before being excreted. They are designed to fool us. These cakes are not emotionally gratifying which is an oft-mooted prerequisite if you are going to classify something as kitsch. Too much. I can’t stand them.
But sometimes I want to eat something that transcends food in appearance, or is child-like, or mirrors popular culture in some way. I love hand-carved ham but I am also interested in pre-formed ham in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head which appeals to the part of me that rebels against food earnestness. I could bake a cake effigy of Dame Edna Everage imagined as a koala using expensive ingredients or stand and goggle at shelves of Little Debbies or Mr Kipling French Fancies (so kitsch!) before buying a couple of packs of them. I can also try to work towards an economic system where people are paid fairly, the price of food reflects its labour, and dietary choice is affordable to all. The manufacture of Little Debbie cakes need not be exploitative but the awful truth is that kitsch is often used to mask the ugliness of industrial food processes.
So, back to that homemade Kylie Showgirl cake. Can we see beyond its kitschy campness (and yes the two endlessly cross over)? I’m not even a Kylie fan but when I look at it I see the commemoration of a musical icon by people of all sexualities, a woman who coped with breast cancer and its treatment, who resists two-by-two Noah’s Arkification, and whose reach straddles both hemispheres. If kitsch trivialises complex ideas by reducing them to stereotypes can we really say this applies to this Kylie cake when its context is so clearly apparent to me? I can’t be the only one to feel this way. Yet we consume her music, films, and tours. We buy her calendars, read gossip, and bake her into a delicious cake to enjoy and consume. In eating her, this celestial being becomes a part of our own mortality and we achieve the Romantic goal of beautifying our ordinary lives. That’s so kitsch.
Further reading!
Sometimes you want a cake book that rushes up to you shouting “Ra! Ra! Ra!” as if it were a five-year-old pretending to be a dinosaur. Bake Australia Great by Katharine Sabbath is such a book. It contains plenty of cakes I love, but realistically I am probably not going to bake any of them although the Glamington layer cake does tempt me. I can see Nigella riffing off the Sydney Opera House Pav topped with spiced peaches though. This book is a great introduction to Australian culture and the icons they hold dear and the introduction does acknowledge the fact that archaeological excavations revealed that First Australian Nations were grinding wheat into flour some thirty-six thousand years ago. You can find her website here.
I shouldn’t laugh but OMFG. And this, the kitschiest peacock that ever strutted the earth. And a book about baking for Santa that has vintage, kitsch and camp charm (sailors admiring cookies!) Secondhand copies are also available from Satan’s Online bookstore.
“Let Them Burn Cake!: Teaching a Royal to Cook in a Week” is a brilliant idea. A descendant of Marie Antoinette learns to cook; we get recipes.
One day I will bake the Pumpkin Pecan Dump Cake in this book simply because of its alliterative kitschiness.
Nigella knows how to inject kitsch—and camp— into a plate of food and its preparation. From leopard print shower caps popped on top of proving bread to the black latex CSI gloves she dons to prep beetroot, Christmas cakes adorned with tiny plastic skiers, a ‘trashy’ chocolate lime cheesecake inspired by the old British sucky sweets, and a basket of apple cinnamon muffins as if baked by Bree Van Den Kamp herself, she is archly kitsch when it suits her to be. (The oft-misunderstood ironic, kitsch AND camp ‘How To Be a Domestic Goddess’ book title comes to mind).
Jeffrey Steingarten attempts to bake Paul Prudhomme’s famous coconut cake. This is what Ditta Von Teese might spring from had she a mind to. There’s something pretty kitsch about Steingarten’s labours.
I need this book for Davey Jones’ ‘Orange Kiss Me Cake’ alone but 1. the book costs eleven million pounds and 2. It is probably a terrible cake.
Kitchen Kitsch: Vintage Food Graphics by Jim Heimann is a book I always have to hand. It is a wonderful mood board for anyone wanting to write about the subject.
On kitsch in non-western lands.
Egypt and the global aesthetic of kitsch
“You could be presenting an M&M: Just smash it with a mallet and say, 'Everyone gets a microscopic bit of this!' Turn it into a memory. It’s a bonding moment. We all want to bond” writes Charles Phoenix in his book, ‘Holiday Jubilee’ packed with ‘classic and kitschy festivities and fun party recipes’. These include the Cherpumple cake (entire pies inside a cake), photos of Americana (a giant pie a la mode on a float for Van Nuys ‘Rose Day’, the inflatable bunny at The Alamo), a ‘cream-soaked cookie cake of love’, an Easter section with a photo of a truly terrifying cake in the shape of a coconut-covered lamb, complete with demonically smiling child, and although it is not cake-related how could I not draw your attention to his giant Halloween rat meatloaf?
The CCCP Cookbook is not solely about cake but it does show how a series of images from a time when there were great shortages of food can invoke nostalgia for a period we did not personally live through. These images are repackaged as kitsch in our heads. The story behind the recipe for ‘Bird’s Milk Cake’ is especially fascinating.
The Juniors Dessert Cookbook is not intended to be kitsch, but it somehow is both in design, and the name of its recipes. I love the sound of ‘joyful almond cheesecake’, filled with angel-flake coconut (which sounds so kitsch too) and crowned with a chocolate ganache. Of course the lemon loaf is titled ‘Grandma’s’.
Grandparent-kitsch deserves its own newsletter but for now, here are a few books that I think perfectly demonstrate the aesthetic. The Vintage Baker by Jessie Sheehan takes its inspiration from her collection of homely baking booklets that were issued free to American housewives from the early 1900s and she updates some of her most-loved recipes. I love the meta-ness of its concept which reminds me of Wayne Thibaud, an artist whose work has in the past been miscategorised as ‘Pop Art’ (which can be terribly kitsch). Sheehan’s book brings ekphrasis to mind, a term used by classicists to describe a literary form whose goal is to make the reader imagine the thing described as if it were actually present. In a similar vein is ‘Flapper Pie and Blue Prairie Sky’ by Karlynn Johnston, a Canadian baker with a prairie farm aesthetic. She even includes a pictorial index for the vintage pyrex she collects and uses to style her food.
On the subject of art -> kitsch-> art, how about this book which shows you how to recreate great works of art in cake form? And here’s a collation of Thiebaud’s dessert and cityscapes.
“Discover a new world of decadence from the celebrated traditions of European baking! “
The Cookie Jar Cookbook by Steffi Berne is an odd mixture of inappropriate (southern recipes are illustrated by cookie jars in the form of enslaved Black people), the unintentionally modern (‘gingerbread persons’) and kitschy names (‘Alexander’s Graham Bells’ for her son’s favourite PB cookies). The fact that the American popular culture the book reflects back at us (cookie jars in the shape of log cabins, Little Red Riding Hood, early space travel, scarecrows, owls) is mainly white is important. I don’t think many Mexican-American people would be very fond of an owl-shaped cookie jar, for example. More on La Lechuza here.
I have a real love of cookbooks that are in the shape of their subject (in this case, an apple), or a finished product.
Elvis and Priscilla’s wedding cake.
An interview with PL Travers in the NYT about the book “Mary Poppins in the Kitchen: A Cookery Book With a Story”. All book-themed cookbooks are kitsch by their very nature imo.
When Dolly bakes it is pure kitsch. The funnel cakes at Dollywood are insane; all the food is.
This book contains a recipe for ‘Texas Big Hair Lemon-Lime Meringue Tarts’. ‘Nuff said. (It’s not a cake book though.)
Cake and pudding colouring books.
I recommend Ann Byrne’s books, ‘American Cake’ and ‘American Bites: The Snaps, Drops, Jumbles, Tea Cakes, Bars and Brownies That We Have Loved for Generations’, the latter of which has an insanely kitsch title imo.
“Unless you are seriously into candy, film history or ZaZu Pitts, this might not be a book for you,” writes an Amazon reviewer about movie star Za Zu Pit’s candy cookbook. (Not an Amazon link, btw.)