Icing On The Cake

It doesn’t matter if you’re in Beijing^W, Jiangxi^W, Henan^W, Shanghai^W, orTibet^W – anywhere you go in China, all cake shops are pretty much the same. The flavor is the same, the designs are the same, and there’s not much variation in prices. The frosting is usually white and fluffy made to look beautiful with intricate flowery designs, but the cake itself has a kind of old cardboard consistency.

The reason for this homogeneous cake culture is that the purpose for purchasing cakes is not so one can eat the cake. The purpose for purchasing a cake is to smear the icing on other people’s faces. It seems that vaudeville, cake-in-the-face, slapstick, physical humor of the 1930s is alive and well here in China, much to the lament of pastry chefs who might be living in the country. Still, it’s part of the whole experience. You haven’t been to a birthday party in China until you’ve had cake smeared on your face. Every single party I’ve been to in China that involves a cake results in bodies, faces, clothes, and walls covered in the icing.

In one particularly memorable incident, I, along with one of my colleagues, treated eight class monitors to a meal of hot pot at the end of one school term. We bought a cake to share amongst the ten of us. No sooner had we opened the cake’s box then the battle began. We were not in a private room, either. It was a very publicestablishment. The staff simply looked at us helplessly, knowing that we had to get this out of our systems. At one point, I lobbed a mass of frosting at a student’s head, and it missed her and struck a passing waitress in the face. She ran and hid in the kitchen. Two other students were running after each other in the hallway, cake frosting sticking in their hair.

Cake icing battles are a no fail, must do policy in China. It doesn’t matter if you are in a public place or not. You will find no holds barred food fights here when frosting is involved. Strap yourself in, and get a handful of frosting before you get a face-full.

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