Sitting in Bars with Cake: Lessons and Recipes from One Year of Trying to Bake My Way to a Boyfriend by Audrey Shulman Page A
Authors: Audrey Shulman
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quits and throw myself into full-fledged spinsterhood. So in an uncharacteristically brazen disregard for rational action, I decided I would go back to what had worked for me: I would meet guys by taking cakes to bars on a regular and relentless basis. I just wouldn’t go to the same bar twice, lest I give up the whole charade.
It sounded like a feasible strategy: bake fifty cakes and take them to fifty bars over the course of a year, offering pieces to potential boyfriends until one surfaced. If I was still single when it was all said and done, at least I would know I had made a pretty valiant effort to not be.
So I did it.
I did it for an entire year, you guys
.
I took fifty freaking cakes around town and spent a billion dollars on confectioners’ sugar. And now I have eight cavities and a helluva lot of stories to prove it, this book being a collection of my very favorite encounters.
After making it through my dating-permissible years with such a paltry amount of male interaction, here was my marathon of being-with-boys experience. I met dozens of guys in dozens of bars: guys who were sweet, guys who were nuts, guys who asked me to marry them, and guys who were already married to other people. I had set out to find a boyfriend, but I was picking up a whole handbook of information instead—lessons you can only learn at two o’clock in the morning when you’re giving out cake for free.Every single guy I met was teaching me something, whether he wanted any cake or not. For example:
• Male follow-up skills are slower than dial-up.
• Rebounding is for basketball players and Taylor Swift, not you.
• “I’m full” = “I have a girlfriend,” because guys are never full.
Sitting in bars with cake meant opening myself up in ways I never had before. (Um, number one being I had to start drinking.) Yes, it was nerve-racking to go up to strangers every single week and offer them cake, and yes, it was embarrassing if they didn’t want any or their girlfriends surfaced mid-offer and I had to quietly back away from the table and pretend I was never there. It was disappointing when guys acted interested and I never heard from them again, and even more so when things progressed to dating but still didn’t work out. I was also eating millions of calories’ worth of cake batter every week and churning out thousands of dirty dishes. But I’d do it all over again. This dating strategy eventually came to feel normal—I even came to love it.
This is my frosting-filled record of the cake-eaters (and a couple non-cake-eaters) I met that year—the guys responsible for the unexpected education that got me to the other side of the being-with-boys department, a new place where I’m happier, savvier, and far more confident. I might even be better at baking.
There are recipes to go along with the stories; I figured you might want to have some cake on hand while you read.
xx
Audrey
A
GETTING STARTED
Let’s get real, people. I’m a home baker. I have zero professional training, which means I’m not above cramming together a crumbly cake in a lasagna pan and covering the evidence with frosting.
I’m pretty sure it will still taste just as good
.
This is great news for you. Even the most inexperienced of bakers should be able to make and enjoy the following recipes without spending their entire weekend (a) hunting for complicated ingredients, (b) slaving over the stove, or (c) popping muscle relaxers.
Here’s a supply list to get you started. It covers everything from baking and getting ready to actually serving up cakes in bars, although I would recommend looking through your desired cake’s ingredient list before diving in (as some recipes occasionally call for something a little more unusual). Best of luck!
A
Supplies
unbleached white flour
large eggs
unsalted butter
vanilla extract
granulated sugar
brown sugar
confectioners’ sugar
sour cream or Greek yogurt
whole milk (although 2 percent will
It sounded like a feasible strategy: bake fifty cakes and take them to fifty bars over the course of a year, offering pieces to potential boyfriends until one surfaced. If I was still single when it was all said and done, at least I would know I had made a pretty valiant effort to not be.
So I did it.
I did it for an entire year, you guys
.
I took fifty freaking cakes around town and spent a billion dollars on confectioners’ sugar. And now I have eight cavities and a helluva lot of stories to prove it, this book being a collection of my very favorite encounters.
After making it through my dating-permissible years with such a paltry amount of male interaction, here was my marathon of being-with-boys experience. I met dozens of guys in dozens of bars: guys who were sweet, guys who were nuts, guys who asked me to marry them, and guys who were already married to other people. I had set out to find a boyfriend, but I was picking up a whole handbook of information instead—lessons you can only learn at two o’clock in the morning when you’re giving out cake for free.Every single guy I met was teaching me something, whether he wanted any cake or not. For example:
• Male follow-up skills are slower than dial-up.
• Rebounding is for basketball players and Taylor Swift, not you.
• “I’m full” = “I have a girlfriend,” because guys are never full.
Sitting in bars with cake meant opening myself up in ways I never had before. (Um, number one being I had to start drinking.) Yes, it was nerve-racking to go up to strangers every single week and offer them cake, and yes, it was embarrassing if they didn’t want any or their girlfriends surfaced mid-offer and I had to quietly back away from the table and pretend I was never there. It was disappointing when guys acted interested and I never heard from them again, and even more so when things progressed to dating but still didn’t work out. I was also eating millions of calories’ worth of cake batter every week and churning out thousands of dirty dishes. But I’d do it all over again. This dating strategy eventually came to feel normal—I even came to love it.
This is my frosting-filled record of the cake-eaters (and a couple non-cake-eaters) I met that year—the guys responsible for the unexpected education that got me to the other side of the being-with-boys department, a new place where I’m happier, savvier, and far more confident. I might even be better at baking.
There are recipes to go along with the stories; I figured you might want to have some cake on hand while you read.
xx
Audrey
A
GETTING STARTED
Let’s get real, people. I’m a home baker. I have zero professional training, which means I’m not above cramming together a crumbly cake in a lasagna pan and covering the evidence with frosting.
I’m pretty sure it will still taste just as good
.
This is great news for you. Even the most inexperienced of bakers should be able to make and enjoy the following recipes without spending their entire weekend (a) hunting for complicated ingredients, (b) slaving over the stove, or (c) popping muscle relaxers.
Here’s a supply list to get you started. It covers everything from baking and getting ready to actually serving up cakes in bars, although I would recommend looking through your desired cake’s ingredient list before diving in (as some recipes occasionally call for something a little more unusual). Best of luck!
A
Supplies
unbleached white flour
large eggs
unsalted butter
vanilla extract
granulated sugar
brown sugar
confectioners’ sugar
sour cream or Greek yogurt
whole milk (although 2 percent will
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