What are the qualities of an excellent slice of cake?

For me, I want the cake to be what I’ll call extremely-moist-dry-matic. This is when the cake approaches the furthest point possible toward mush while somehow remaining cake that can be sliced and forked up without disintegrating. It’s just dry enough to get to the mouth, but not dry enough to be mishandled. The fork could easily mush it.

It should also not overly crumb. It’s sweet, but not too sweet. It can’t be picked up with a hand like a coffee cake.

It’s dense, but not too dense.

Cake is terrible. A birthday “cake” should be a pie or some other kind of good dessert item.

@hello321 thank you for participating

Two or three layers. Moist, but not so moist it’s hard to swallow. A contrasting icing. I usually prefer not to have double chocolate or vanilla with white icing.

My favorite cake is Mounds like the candy bar. It has chocolate cake, coconut icing between the layers, and a thin layer or light chocolate icing and then a darker ganache icing on top.

I also really like yellow or almond cake with raspberry jam inbetween with white icing on top.

Lemon pound cake is delicious with a lemon icing glaze. I really like Starbucks. Some lemon cakes taste very artificial so you have to watch for that.

A simple sheet my pick is chocolate with white buttercream icing.

I don’t really care how it’s decorated, but am impressed by the artistry of some cakes, so beautiful.

I like the smooth look of fondant icing on cakes for special occasions, and I like how it tastes too. I know a lot of people who don’t prefer it.

@JLeslie what is the cake matrix like on your preferred cake? The look of bread? A visible bubble pattern? A density that is dry but does not consist of any holes?

Think of the perfect square of sheet cake with a layer of icing. Please tell me what you want to experience there, ideally.

@hello321 do you prefer a pie to be firm, or once it’s cut and plated it sort of rests or turns into a delicious blob.

@hello321 how would you describe a wedding pie?

@Ltryptophan: “do you prefer a pie to be firm, or once it’s cut and plated it sort of rests or turns into a delicious blob.”

In an apple pie, the filling should be very soft. There should almost no resistance to the apple, and definitely no crunch. Once plated, it can completely leak out. Mess is not a negative.

@Ltryptophan: “how would you describe a wedding pie?”

A wedding cake is preferred. Cake is mostly a tradition. And since weddings – especially those with a cake – should just go straight wedding cake. No pie.

@hello321 which is the arch-pie. The pie of pies?

Chocolate three layer with chocolate pudding in the cake mix, raspberry jelly (no seeds) in between layers and dark chocolate frosting with Chambord Liqueur in the frosting. Moist and firm cake with a fruit taste.

@JLeslie already mentioned it – I want a natural flavor and no hint of artificial additives. I don’t eat gluten, so I prefer a cake made from almond flour. Gluten free cakes tend to be gritty, due to rice flour, and that is undesirable to me. I like moist cake that feels light and fluffy in my mouth with a small crumb. Large airholes are unappealing to me, for some reason. I don’t like the cake or frosting to be overly sweet. No alcohol/liqueur.

I like a cake that is not overly sweet, so I tend to like cakes that have whip cream and fruit (not gloppy fruit but real fruit, like strawberries) in between the layers. Keeping with the fruit theme, I like pineapple upside down cake. I like white cake with lemon filling, or raspberry, or apricot.

I don’t usually like cakes that are all chocolate with chocolate icing. To me, they’re too sweet.

I like tres leches cake, which is very moist, almost like a pudding, due to the milk that it’s soaking up.

My favorite cake is a homemade banana cake with whip cream and strawberries. My grandmother used to make it for my birthday. I don’t bake too often because it’s just the two of us eating it so after a few days, I get tired of it.

When we had a surprise party for my mom’s 50th birthday, I asked her what her favorite cake was and she said chocolate with whip cream. We ordered a chocolate cake with whip cream from a great bakery and it wasn’t too sweet, it was perfect.

I don’t often like cakes from supermarkets, because they taste like chemicals, and I don’t like fondant icing. I know it’s very popular for cake decorating but I don’t care for the taste or texture.

Moist, chilled and not overly sweet is my kind of excellent cake.

There shouldn’t be large bubbles. I think a typical birthday sheet cake has the correct look and feel of most cakes.

Here is a photo of the mounds cake. It’s imbedded in Facebook I hope you can see it. The white part is the coconut icing, but it’s mostly actual coconut, not icing. https://www.facebook.com/314846162811/posts/10157151171107812/?d=n

Not too much frosting is key. Big gobs of frosting are nasty and get left behind on the plate. I like a good balance between frosting and cake, and at this point I just prefer ice cream cake in which the layers alternate between cake and ice cream. Sounds perfect to me. :)

@jca2 My traditional birthday cake, made by my Mom, was a banana layer cake. I liked it with raspberry jam between the layers and coffee icing; my brothers liked it with whipped cream. I usually make it for myself around my birthday and freeze slices for consumption in the coming months.

My father’s older sister, my aunt used to make a Devil’s Food cake with mayonnaise and Gerber’s pureed beets in the cake mix. She’d make is a sheet cake and put cream cheese frosting on it. My dad loved it, I liked it. I think she brought the cake to potlucks at the Methodist Church.

@janbb: Banana cake with coffee icing sounds really good!

Yeah, coffee and banana does sound good. I love coffee flavored desserts, I never thought of that combination.

Is the Banana cake light like a traditional birthday cake? The banana cakes I have had are very dense, more like a banana bread or pound cake texture.

@JLeslie It’s somewhere in between, not super light but not as dense as banana bread.

Soft, and not rubbery (angel food cake is what I think of as rubbery). Very moist, poind cake is about perfect, and not with the traditional buttercream frosting. I find buttercream frosting to be way too sweet, and stiff. I also don’t like the taste or texture of fondant icing.

I’ve had some type of whipped cream types of frosting that were velvety smooth, and not too sweet. I’ve also had another kind of frosting that was also very smooth, and not so sweet. I think it might be called flour frosting. I also like powdered sugar icing type of frosting, like the kind you drizzle over gingerbread cake and other quick breads.

I also don’t like cakes that are too sweet, such as most chocolate cake, although I do like German chocolate cake which is a more mild taste to me. But I actually prefer fruit flavored cakes the best, especially lemon, and strawberry, and I like the filling to be some type of jam, or whipped cream, but not buttercream or custard.

If given a choice, I like cake served cold, rather than at room temperature. Somewhat dense (as opposed to angel food cake, which has too much air).

Baskin Robbins used to make excellent ice cream cakes. Don’t know of they still do.

Not too much icing.

Moist cake with lots of buttercream icing.

A good carrot cake with a nice cream cheese icing is also one of my favorites, and I don’t mind if pineapple, raisins, nuts or any and all are added to the cake.

@jca2 I make a carrot cake with all of those, except nuts. Sometimes I put orange buttercream frosting on it instead of the traditional cram cheese frosting and it is delicious.

It needs to be about 90% poppyseeds.

I’m partial to cakes from Asian bakeries. They’re boing-ier than the usual American cake. And both the cake and frosting are not as sweet, which I like.

There should be equal amount of cake and icing.

@raum What’s “boing-ier”?

Errr…more boing? :P

^^ So what’s boing?

springiness.

What loli said. :D

@raum Ok. I guess I never think of springiness as a positive quality of cake but I understand now. :-)