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Cake

 
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Cake

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Rock band

In 1997 Cake’s popularity exploded and their shows sold out across the United States with the release of Fashion Nugget, proving that a modern rock band who performed melancholy pop songs mixed with funk, folk, country, and a mariachi country could succeed in the music industry. Throughout the group’s rise to the top since its formation in 1991, Cake experienced repeated lineup changes. Nonetheless, at moments when most bands would crumble, Cake continued to forge ahead, and the group’s subsequent album, 1998’s Prolonging the Magic, was considered by critics as their most ambitious collection of songs to date. More than just a trendy alternative rock group, Cake exhibited a uniqueness on all three of their full–length albums with a full–time trumpeter, country–inspired guitar melodies, and the poetic, eclectic, and sometimes sarcastic lyrics of lead singer and chief songwriter John McCrea. The group’s songs, though they sound modern, also exhibit an older and familiar feeling and tell stories of hard luck and lost love.

McCrea, born around 1965 in Sacramento, California, spent most of the 1980s in his hometown of Sacramento,

where he played solo as well as with various bands. Besides rock, McCrea held an interest in other musical styles as well. In the late 1980s, McCrea moved to Los Angeles, believing that his chances of succeeding in music would improve in the larger city. Once in here, he played solo acoustic music at various coffee shops around the Los Angeles area. As a solo artist, McCrea performed many of the songs that would eventually make Cake a well–known name, such as "I Bombed Korea," "Haze of Love," "Sheep Go to Heaven," and "Jesus Wrote a Blank Check."

By 1991, McCrea realized that living in Los Angeles had done little to improve his career. Therefore, he moved back to Sacramento and formed Cake. He recruited Frank French on drums, Vince di Fiore on trumpet, Greg Brown on guitar, and Sean McFessel on bass. McFessel left the band the same year to attend college. Regarding his decision to add a trumpet playerto the group, McCrea told Joe Schaeffer of the Washington Times, "When the band was first put together, we didn’t have a trumpet for the first month. I knew we didn’t want a searing, soaring, brave, white lead guitar making its way through the clouds. And I was listening to a lot of mariachi music, and it struck me that the trumpet didn’t have such a stigma." Subsequently, needing a new bassist, McCrea replaced McFessel with Gabe Nelson. Two years later in 1993, Cake released their first record, a seven–inch single called "Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle," which also included the song "Jolene" on the flip side.

After this, the group headed to the studio to work on their first album, the self–produced Motorcade of Generosity, an albumapplauded for its superb songwriting as well as for it’s airy, low production quality. The members of Cake worked on the album in between their day jobs: driving cabs, working for courier services, and waiting tables. Determined to make a record even in the absence of record company support, Cake paid for the entire project themselves, recorded the songs by themselves, and designed all of the artwork for the album. Upon the completion of their debut, they sold Motorcade of Generosity on their own without distribution.

Soon, though, Cake and Motorcade of Generosity caught the attention of Capricorn Records, and in 1994, the group signed with the label and reissued their debut in its original form. Despite this achievement, Cake saw two more members leave the group that year; French and Nelson left the band, and drummer Todd Roper and bassist Victor Damiani joined as their replacements. The reshaped quintet started touring the United States in smaller venues, selling their own t–shirts on stage to earn extra money. In the meantime, later that year, Capricorn released the group’s 1993 single "Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle," which received air play on college and alternative radio stations across the country. In addition, McCrea coproduced a video for the song that aired sparingly on the cable channel MTV (Music Television). While the band’s popularity continued to grow, Capricorn released two more singles from Cake’s debut: "Ruby Sees All," followed by "Jolene."

As soon as Cake completed their first national club tour, they returned to Sacramento to work on their follow–up album. In the same Sacramento studios they used to record their debut, Cake recorded the more refined Fashion Nugget In late 1995 and early 1996. Later that year, Capricorn released the album, which featured the group’s first hit single "The Distance." The song peaked at number three on modern rock charts, and the song’s video climbed to number three on MTV as well. In December of 1996, while Cake made another tour, Capricorn released the next single from the album entitled "I Will Survive," a cover of Gloria Gaynor’s selfpromoting 1970s disco anthem. Instead of playing the song as a modern rock–infused disco remake, Cake opted to perform a serious, straight version that adhered to Gaynor’s original spirit, with di Fiore’s trumpet weaving through stringed instruments. Again, radio listeners and music video viewers reacted with enthusiasm.

As Cake’s popularity continued to soar upon the release of Fashion Nugget, the group accepted an invitation to open for the rock band the Counting Crows on their East Coast Tour. In the spring of 1997, another popular single from the record, "Frank Sinatra," hit store shelves, and Cake saw another change in the group’s lineup. Damiani said goodbye to Cake in order to pursue other interests, and the band persuaded bassist Nelson to return in his place. By this time, though, the fast pace of recording and touring caught up with McCrea, who was forced to cut theband’s tour short because of extreme exhaustion. Thus, McCrea and Cake returned to Sacramento to rest before working on the next project.

Subsequently, another band member left Cake in January of 1998. This time, the group lost guitarist Brown, who formed a new group called Deathray with Damiani. Roper, Cake’s drummer, admitted that personality conflicts plagued the group since the single "The Distance," written by Brown, propelled the group into mainstream acceptance. As he told Ken Micallef in an interview for the Launch.com website, "John can be difficult to be around. That Greg [Brown] wrote the hit and John received all the attention created a lot of tension in the band. We would often travel across the country in our van and not say a word to each other for six hours straight. That was normal for us."

Despite the group’s internal strife, McCrea nonetheless regretted the loss of his band mate. "It wasn’t easy," said McCrea in an interview with Michael Mehle published in the Denver Rocky Mountain News. "Mostly, what wasn’t easy was having a sense of faith that everything was going to work out. It really didn’t seem like it would. I was really contemplating disbanding and starting something new. Greg was a really big part of the band. However, I’m really glad that we kept going." After Brown’s departure, the band needed a new guitarist, but McCrea decided not to replace him right away. Instead, he chose to use a variety of guitarists for Cake’s third album, Prolonging the Magic, completed by August and released in September of 1998.

The more tight–knight Prolonging the Magic marked the peak of Cake’s recording career with the album’s groove beats, weaving guitar and mariachi trumpet lines, and obvious country influences. "The trumpet work of Vincent di Fiore slips in and out of the songs, punching up the choruses and adding wistful undertones to the verses. McCrea delivers a string of poetic non sequiturs in his delightful deadpan [voice], exploring deceivingly dark subjects about one–way relationships, the emptiness of Sunset Strip, the allure of evil and the power of greed," concluded Mehle. The album also contained the group’s most successful hit single, "Never There," an older song that McCrea originally wrote and arranged when he was 18. The single made it’s way to the number one spot on Billboard magazine’s alternative rock charts and maintained this position forthree weeks. The song’s critical acclaim and radio popularity surprised McCrea and the rest of the band, because they experienced trouble recording the track in the studio. Moreover, the single sounded different, as well as more impressive, than Cake’s prior radio successes.

Other noteworthy singles on Prolonging the Magic included catchy tunes such as "Daria" and "Friend Is a Four Letter Word," the sing along "Satan Is My Motor," and the Hawaiian guitarinfluenced "Mexico." In reference to the group’s third release, Brown professed, "It’s about John’s great songs and his vision," as quoted by Micallef. "Some of these are his oldest songs, but they are also some of his best. I may criticize him, but it’s done in a spirit of love." Prior to the album’s release date, back in August, Cake held auditions to find a permanent guitarist and hired Xan McCurdy to fill the opening. Thatfall, Cake arrived overseas for their first European tour, followed by a tour beginning in the spring of 1999 in the United States.

After promoting Prolonging the Magic, McCrea intended to take some time off to write for awhile, although fans were already asking when Cake would release their next record, and record company executives worried that if Cake took a break, the public might forget about the group. "They [Capricorn] haven’t given me much time to write new songs," McCrea conceded to Mehle. "What happens, when you’re in a band, is that you release a record, put everything you have into that record, go on tour for a year and a half, trying to introduce it to people. You get off the road and people ask: ’Where the hell is your next album? It’s been ayear and a half, where’s you’re next album?’ You just want to say, ’Give me a break.’"

Selected discography
Motorcade of Generosity, Capricorn, 1994.
Fashion Nugget, Capricorn, 1996.
Flirting With Disaster (soundtrack), Geffen Records, 1996.
An American Werewolf In Paris (soundtrack), Hollywood, 1997.
Live From 6A:… With Conan O’Brien (compilation), Mercury, 1997.
MTV Buzz Bin Vol. 2 (compilation), Mammoth Records, 1997.
Prolonging the Magic, Capricorn, 1998.

Sources
Books
Graff, Gary and Daniel Durchholz, editors, musicHound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1999.

Periodicals
Arizona Republic, February 11, 1999, p. 40.
Columbian, February 21, 1999.
Dallas Morning News, March 13, 1997, p. 35A; February 8, 1999, p. 23A.
Denver Rocky Mountain News, July 2, 1997, p. 19D; February 8, 1999, p. 5D.
Gannett News Service, December 20, 1996.
Independent, April 23, 1991, p. 12.
St. Louis Post–Dispatch, February 27, 1997, p. 10.
Washington Times, November 12, 1998, p. M2.

Online
"Cake, A Band from Sacremento," Cake (official website), http://www.cakemusic.com (September 7, 1999).
"Cake: Dilemma in the Frosting, "Launch.com: Discover New Music, http://www.launch.com (September 7, 1999).
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Cake

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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Wikipedia
For other uses, see Cake (disambiguation).
A layered pound cake filled with raspberry jam and lemon curd, and finished with buttercream frosting

Cake is a form of bread or bread-like food. In its modern forms, it is typically a sweet and enriched baked dessert. In its oldest forms, cakes were normally fried breads or cheesecakes, and normally had a disk shape. Determining whether a given food should be classified as bread, cake, or pastry can be difficult.

Modern cake, especially layer cakes, normally contain a combination of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter or oil, with some varieties also requiring liquid (typically milk or water) and leavening agents (such as yeast or baking powder). Flavorful ingredients like fruit purées, nuts, dried or candied fruit, or extracts are often added, and numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients are possible. Cakes are often filled with fruit preserves or dessert sauces (like pastry cream), iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders or candied fruit.[1]

Cake is often the dessert of choice for meals at ceremonial occasions, particularly weddings, anniversaries, and birthdays. There are countless cake recipes; some are bread-like, some rich and elaborate, and many are centuries old. Cake making is no longer a complicated procedure; while at one time considerable labor went into cake making (particularly the whisking of egg foams), baking equipment and directions have been simplified that even the most amateur cook may bake a cake.

Contents

Varieties

German chocolate cake

Cakes are broadly divided into several categories, based primarily on ingredients and cooking techniques.

  • Yeast cakes are the oldest and are very similar to yeast breads. Such cakes are often very traditional in form, and include such pastries as babka and stollen.
  • Cheesecakes, despite their name, aren't really cakes at all. Cheesecakes are in fact custard pies, with a filling made mostly of some form of cheese (often cream cheese, mascarpone, ricotta or the like), and have very little flour added, although a flour-based or graham cracker crust may be used. Cheesecakes are also very old, with evidence of honey-sweetened cakes dating back to ancient Greece.
  • Sponge cakes are thought to be the first of the non-yeast-based cakes and rely primarily on trapped air in a protein matrix (generally of beaten eggs) to provide leavening, sometimes with a bit of baking powder or other chemical leaven added as insurance. Such cakes include the Italian/Jewish pan di Spagna and the French Génoise. Highly decorated sponge cakes with lavish toppings are sometimes called gateau; the French word for cake.
  • Butter cakes, including the pound cake and devil's food cake, rely on the combination of butter, eggs, and sometimes baking powder or bicarbonate of soda to provide both lift and a moist texture.
A large cake garnished with strawberries

Beyond these classifications, cakes can be classified based on their appropriate accompaniment (such as coffee cake) and contents (e.g. fruitcake or flourless chocolate cake).

Some varieties of cake are widely available in the form of cake mixes, wherein some of the ingredients (usually flour, sugar, flavoring, baking powder, and sometimes some form of fat) are premixed, and the cook needs add only a few extra ingredients, usually eggs, water, and sometimes vegetable oil or butter. While the diversity of represented styles is limited, cake mixes do provide an easy and readily available homemade option for cooks who are not accomplished bakers.

Special-purpose cakes

Cakes may be classified according to the occasion for which they are intended. For example, wedding cakes, birthday cakes, Christmas cakes and Passover plava (a type of sponge cake sometimes made with matzo meal) are all identified primarily according to the celebration they are intended to accompany. The cutting of a wedding cake constitutes a social ceremony in some cultures. The Ancient Roman marriage ritual of confarreatio originated in the sharing of a cake.

Particular types of cake may be associated with particular festivals, such as stollen or chocolate log (at Christmas), babka and simnel cake (at Easter), or mooncake. There has been a long tradition of decorating an iced cake at Christmas time; other cakes associated with Christmas include chocolate log and mince pies.

Shapes

Cakes are frequently described according to their physical form. Cakes may be small and intended for individual consumption. Larger cakes may be made with the intention of being sliced and served as part of a meal or social function. Common shapes include:

Cake flour

A decorated birthday cake
Main article: Flour

Special cake flour with a high starch-to-gluten ratio is made from fine-textured, soft, low-protein wheat. It is strongly bleached, and compared to all-purpose flour, cake flour tends to result in cakes with a lighter, less dense texture.[2] Therefore, it is frequently specified or preferred in cakes meant to be soft, light, and or bright white, such as angel food cake. However, if cake flour is called for, a substitute can be made by replacing a small percentage of all-purpose flour with cornstarch or removing two tablespoons from each cup of all-purpose flour.[3][4][5] Some recipes explicitly specify or permit all-purpose flour, notably where a firmer or denser cake texture is desired.

Cake decorating

Main article: Cake decorating
A chocolate cake decorated with icing, strawberries, and silvery sugar beads or Dragées.
A slice of strawberry cake with garnishing of strawberry.
Chocolate layer cake with chocolate frosting and shaved chocolate topping

A finished cake is often enhanced by covering it with icing, or frosting, and toppings such as sprinkles, which are also known as "jimmies" in certain parts of the United States and "hundreds and thousands" in the United Kingdom. Frosting is usually made from powdered (icing) sugar, sometimes a fat of some sort, milk or cream, and often flavorings such as vanilla extract or cocoa powder. Some decorators use a rolled fondant icing. Commercial bakeries tend to use lard for the fat, and often whip the lard to introduce air bubbles. This makes the icing light and spreadable. Home bakers either use lard, butter, margarine or some combination thereof. Sprinkles are small firm pieces of sugar and oils that are colored with food coloring. In the late 20th century, new cake decorating products became available to the public. These include several specialized sprinkles and even methods to print pictures and transfer the image onto a cake.

Special tools are needed for more complex cake decorating, such as piping bags or syringes, and various piping tips. To use a piping bag or syringe, a piping tip is attached to the bag or syringe using a coupler. The bag or syringe is partially filled with icing which is sometimes colored. Using different piping tips and various techniques, a cake decorator can make many different designs. Basic decorating tips include open star, closed star, basketweave, round, drop flower, leaf, multi, petal, and specialty tips.

Royal icing, marzipan (or a less sweet version, known as almond paste), fondant icing (also known as sugarpaste) and buttercream are used as covering icings and to create decorations. Floral sugarcraft or wired sugar flowers are an important part of cake decoration. Cakes for special occasions, such as wedding cakes, are traditionally rich fruit cakes or occasionally Madeira cakes (also known as whisked or fatless sponge), that are covered with marzipan and either iced using royal icing or sugarpaste. They are finished with piped borders (made with royal icing) and adorned with a piped message, wired sugar flowers, hand-formed fondant flowers, marzipan fruit, piped flowers, or crystallized fruits or flowers such as grapes or violets.

History

The term "cake" has a long history. The word itself is of Viking origin, from the Old Norse word "kaka".[6]

Although clear examples of the difference between cake and bread are easy to find, the precise classification has always been elusive.[7] For example, banana bread may be properly considered either a quick bread or a cake.

The Greeks invented beer as a leavener, frying fritters in olive oil, and cheesecakes using goat's milk.[8] In ancient Rome, basic bread dough was sometimes enriched with butter, eggs, and honey, which produced a sweet and cake-like baked good.[7] Latin poet Ovid refers to the birthday of him and his brother with party and cake in his first book of exile, Tristia.[9]

Early cakes in England were also essentially bread: the most obvious differences between a "cake" and "bread" were the round, flat shape of the cakes, and the cooking method, which turned cakes over once while cooking, while bread was left upright throughout the baking process.[7]

Sponge cakes, leavened with beaten eggs, originated during the Renaissance, possibly in Spain.[10]

See also

References

  1. ^ Cake finishes. Youtube.com. Retrieved on 2011-12-23.
  2. ^ Types of Flour. Whatscookingamerica.net. Retrieved on 2011-12-23.
  3. ^ Cake flour properties and substitutions. Gourmetsleuth.com. Retrieved on 2011-12-23.
  4. ^ Is cake flour necessary?. Aww.ninemsn.com.au (2007-08-01). Retrieved on 2011-12-23.
  5. ^ Irma von Starkloff Rombauer; Marion Rombauer Becker (1 June 1975). Joy of cooking. Simon and Schuster. pp. 547–. ISBN 978-0-02-604570-4. http://books.google.com/books?id=C4_5MCUd6ucC&pg=PA547. Retrieved 23 December 2011. 
  6. ^ The history of cakes. Devlaming.co.za. Retrieved on 2011-12-23.
  7. ^ a b c Ayto, John (2002). An A-Z of food and drink. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280352-2. 
  8. ^ Castella, Krystina (2010). A World of Cake: 150 Recipes for Sweet Traditions From Cultures Around the World, pp. 3–4. ISBN 9781603425766.
  9. ^ Ov. Tris. IV. X:12.
  10. ^ Castella, Krystina (2010). A World of Cake: 150 Recipes for Sweet Traditions From Cultures Around the World, pp. 6–7. ISBN 9781603425766.

External links

Wikibooks Cookbook has a recipe/module on

The Wiktionary entry for cake Media related to Cake at Wikimedia Commons


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 
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devil's food cake (rich chocolate cake)
farl
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