A Misshapen Plate Produces Happy Years of Just Desserts

The Boston Herald

It was never pretty even when it was new. It was the pink of Canada mints and mother of pearl white, the pedestal, all white, the top a series of concentric squiggles of pink twirls. I paid 50 cents for it at a yard sale 30 years ago. For a cake plate, even a not so pretty one, this was a bargain.

Its flaw was not its looks, however. The first time I made a cake, Dunkin Hines Devils’ Food double layer, I placed the bottom half on the pink squiggles, frosted it, then put the remaining half on top. I thought the cake was lopsided because I had positioned it wrong. The second time I realized it wasn’t positioning that made the cake slouch but the cake itself. It was crooked because the floor was sloped and the sloped floor made the oven tilt and the tiled oven produced – you guessed it - tilted cakes.

The fact that my cakes had never leaned to one side before we got this plate didn’t  cross my mind. Call it selective reasoning. It was the floor, I said. If I put a marble in the middle of the floor, it rolled to one side. If I put a cake in the oven, it slumped to the same side.  Scientific deduction. Or so I thought. 

The crooked cake became a family staple, like a slightly wobbly and beloved relative who shows up on every holiday. Its tipsy look became so familiar that we noticed it only when other people, visitors or new friends, pointed it out.  Nice cake but aren’t you afraid it’s going to fall on the floor?

One day it did, not because the cake was any more lopsided than usual, but because the top of the plate fell off its pedestal. It happened out of the blue, the way a high heel sometimes snaps off a shoe without cause. The cake was on the plate one minute, and the next it was sprawled on the counter. 

The cake was destroyed, but we ate it anyway. The plate, minus the fact that it was in two, was saved. It was a clean break and with a little Elmer’s glue it was as good as new.

Every cake I ever made sat on that plate. Snow White, Cinderella, Big Bird, Spiderman. All those little plastic birthday people frolicked at an angle. Slope was our signature. If a cake were neat and even and straight, the kids, their teachers, friends, relatives could tell it was bought.

Three years ago we got a new kitchen floor and oven. And I made a cake. And I put it on the plate. And what do you know, the cake was as crooked as ever.

It was the cake plate all the time. If I’d used a level, I would have seen this. Or if I’d put a marble in the middle of the plate instead of in the middle of the floor.

I bought a new, flat, perfect cake plate and made a birthday cake and the cake sat like a queen on that plate, all straight and puffed and dignified. And one daughter said, “It doesn’t look like one of your cakes, Mom.” And the other daughter said, “How come it’s so even?” And my son said, “You bought that cake, didn’t you?”

Shortly after the oldest daughter took home the crooked plate.  And shortly after this, she made a cake. And it leaned a little. And she smiled.

That was a few years ago. A few cakes ago, Norman, the beagle/basset hound, who has a nose for cakes, jumped up on the counter and knocked the cake and the plate to the floor. He ate the cake and licked the shattered plate clean. My son-in-law glued it back together. He did the best he could. But it still looks as if someone took a hammer to it.

Now it is not only crooked. It is cracked. And the base has holes in it. And the side is chipped. And anyone with a clear eye would throw it in the trash.

But our eyes are clouded.  We look at it and see dozens of birthdays and Easters and ordinary days that a crooked cake made special. We look at it and hear Happy Birthday to You and Here Comes Peter Cotton Tail and we see each other, smiling and laughing and having a good time.

Lauren made the Easter cake this year and brought it over on the plate. She has prettier ones, but this is plate she chose. We set it on the table. The cake was a confection of tiny sugar flowers outlined in real flowers, and it hardly sloped at all. And if anyone noticed the chips in the plate and the glue and the empty spaces where pieces of the base used to be, nobody said.

Some things are trash. Some things are treasures. And sometimes some things are both.