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By Alli Geiger
Gooey half-baked cake, slippery icing, and pools of sticky juice; what a cake for a picnic. I had decided to make the picnic cake myself-ish heavy on the ish since I used a box cake and icing. I started on the cake, which was red velvet. The red velvet is essential, but I will save that for later. The directions said to split the batter between two pans, but it barely covered the bottom when I poured half in the first pan. Worrying it would burn and be crisp, I did what any non-practical person would do: poured all the batter in one pan and put it in the oven. You can imagine how well that went, right? The cake came out unevenly cooked and with a drastic dome shape.
I cut the cake in half, flipped the dome upside down, and filled the sides with icing to make the top flat. The cake ever so slowly started to sink back into a dome shape, pushing away the icing. Giving up on the body, I decided to begin icing. Since I had flipped the top over, the crumbly side was showing. Remember when I said it was red velvet? No matter how much icing I put on top, the red mixed with the white. I decided to pipe red roses on top of the cake. For a moment, it was beautiful. That is until the roses started sliding off the dome.
Panicking, I cut strawberries in the hope of creating a wall and keeping the roses from falling off. However, all the strawberries did was make a pool around the edge from juicing and mixing with the icing. It looked disgusting. Absolutely disgusting, but I still brought it, and my friends still ate it. The cake was actually good, like really good. That's my favorite cake story because I am the cake. I believe that everyone is a cake in this metaphorical aspect. And while one would probably think people and cakes are far from the same, neither are Juliet and the sun, but no one argues with Shakespeare. However, I am the cake, and I struggle with my mental health. There are days I can't get out of bed, times when I am too anxious to eat, and those weeks where I can't help but withdraw. And I hear all the time, "love yourself, and it will get better," but how can someone love themself when all they can think about is everything wrong with them.
All I can think about are the not yet baked aspects, the uneven shapes, the messed-up icing, and the failed attempt to keep everything together. I am that cake. But that's not the problem, what's wrong is that I always forget the cake was good. It was a good cake. People liked that cake, just like how I need to remember that people like me too, despite everything wrong because they know that I am a good cake. No matter how bad of a cake someone thinks they might be, someone else thinks they are amazing. Some people might be cakes from Cake Boss, but most aren't, and that's okay. I believe in the cake theory that everyone is a cake, and that people should always remember that even when they think they are messy on the outside, they are still good cake on the inside, and people will love them for who they are.
Alli Geiger is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2026. She is studying political science and Arabic at the University of Louisville.