actuallyclintbarton:

iamshadow21:

actuallyclintbarton:

iamshadow21
replied to your photo “Dear UK tumblr: WHY THE SHIT ARE THESE BRITS EATING CAKE WITH THEIR…”

Australians do this too? I think it’s because we don’t generally cover our cake in so much frosting as Americans, so it’s more like eating a muffin or a doughnut and less like eating something with the consistency of melting ice cream with a small amount of baked good inside with our fingers.

I actually wasn’t even thinking about the frosting, more that cake is soft and moist and crumbly and what kind of dense monstrosity are y’all eating that you can just pick up a slice like it’s a muffin?????

Well, I can’t speak for your cake, but ours is pretty nice, so, nice cake? that we can pick up? I mean, obviously something like mudcake is dense and holds together really well, but a victoria sponge sandwich is like the opposite of that, and you can still hold that if you want to. I will also say that it’s kind of rare for a cake to have more than two layers, often it only has one (with no filling), and so it’s more structurally sound than something that is super tall and has three or four or more layers stacked with thick layers of buttercream or ganache or something. I’m not saying eating a cake off a plate with a fork or a spoon is unheard of, but often, at a birthday party, someone will just cut you a slice and you’ll eat it with your hands from a paper napkin, and somehow we survive with only about as much dessert carnage as any other nationality.

I mean most cakes here don’t have multiple layers of buttercream and shit unless you’re super fancy, but i cannot think of a cake that would hold together nicely.

Like. I think victoria sponge and I think “the sort of thing twinkies are made of, only not gross” and that is… nothing at ALL like actual cake.

I take it back, angel food cake holds together like that, but it’s also gross if it’s not drenched in strawberries and whipped cream.

This is super hard! Like, I know in theory what a Twinkie is, from American media, but they’re not a thing here. And I wouldn’t have a clue what angel food cake is.

Butter cake/pound cake/madeira cake (all different names for the same thing) is a pretty solid ‘base’ cake here, or at least it was for my mother’s generation. It’s a medium density medium moistness cake that my mum often cooks in a square or round cake tin and covers in water icing. Cut into squares or small wedges, it’s perfectly possible to eat with your hands with a few stray crumbs and a bit of icing to lick off your fingers. You can make it plain with just a teaspoon of vanilla, you can make it chocolate by adding cocoa powder to the mix, you can make it any other flavour by adding essences or lemon zest or whatever. You can make it in to cupcakes by putting the batter in patty pans (with a drizzle of water icing and edible ball bearings for decoration). It’s popular because before box cakes were a thing (they didn’t really appear in the supermarkets here until the late eighties) it was a cake basically any home cook could make because the method was simple, used stock staple ingredients, and the cake wasn’t fussy about a rise like sponges could be.