A New Way To Cut The Cake

Some people find great pleasure in cake decorating, and the apex of this art is surely the wedding cake. I have found equal pleasure, however, in dismantling and, so to speak, demolishing wedding cakes.

I still remember the day, early in my career as a banquet waitress, I learned how to cut wedding cakes.

A woman brought a wedding cake she'd made to the country club where I worked. Before she would relinquish the cake to us, this woman insisted on showing us how to cut it. She was sick and tired of seeing her cakes mutilated by bad cutting. The most popular method at that time - cutting the cake into concentric circles and then subdividing the circles into slices - was ridiculous, she claimed, for several reasons: It involved a constant turning of the cake, each slice was cut on an angle, and it did not, as promised, eke the most slices from the cake.

Our self-appointed teacher had a different cutting method, guaranteed to produce the most and most uniform slices from a round cake. Instead of cutting up a series of concentric circles, she divided the cake into a series of horizontal bands, working from the front of the cake to the back, and then cut them into slices.

She worked with a spatula in her left hand, a knife in her right. In easy reach was a container of hot water wrapped in a napkin. Periodically, she'd dip the knife and spatula in the water and scrape off excess frosting on the container's lip. She said if a helper was right in there, holding plates to catch slice after slice, you could serve cake to hundreds of people in a matter of minutes. No turning. No angles. Only beautiful, uniform slices that lay on the plate like elegant little flags.

Later, I was able to employ this technique when I moved to a different country club and the task of cutting cakes was turned over to me.