There is cake and there is icing. A great dessert needs a bit of both but it primarily consists of the cake part. When you achieve the right balance of cake and icing it’s delicious. If you get too much icing the dessert can be too sugary and sweet. If you don’t get any icing it’s a bit boring and you might as well just eat a muffin.
Icing tastes awesome. But if you eat too much of it you will feel sick because icing is basically just sugar. There is no substance to icing. Cake, on the other hand, is full of substance. It has good stuff like eggs, flour and oils. The cake part contains fat and protein, which will stay with you longer than sugar will.
It’s easy to focus on the icing because it’s right there on top just begging to be eaten. It also takes very little time to make the icing. Cake takes longer to make- you have to mix a whole bunch of things together and then put it in the oven for quite awhile. There is no instant gratification with the cake part. You have to work for it and you have to be patient.
But so often the icing gets all the glory for how good a cake is. This is a shame because the cake is the real hero in this relationship. The cake has to live buried beneath a superficial layer of sweetness where nobody notices it. But without the cake there would be no foundation for the icing, there would be no substance to the thing and there would certainly not be a very satisfying dessert. The good thing is that cake don’t care. Cake don’t give a shit about whether anyone notices how important it is. Cake is super zen about the whole thing because it is ok with its position in the structure of things. And icing, well, icing knows. It knows that it has no substance and that’s why it fights to be seen and fights to be important and fights to be on top. It knows that without cake it’s just a sickeningly sweet, superficial thing and that scares icing because it knows it is not that significant. But cake…..cake is cool with itself because it recognizes its’ significance- it took time, energy and effort to arrive at cake-hood and it don’t give a shit whether you notice it or not.