Today my girlfriend was watching a competition on the Food Network for "extreme" (?) cake makers. While the cakes are amazing, I came away slightly baffled. Days old sheet cake covered in layer after layer of fondant (which apparently is some sort of modified flour paste that tastes terrible, but looks great on cake) doesn't seem like a particularly appetizing recipe, and of course these cakes are never consumed, nor were they meant to be.
This seems patently absurd to me. I realize that we're in some kind of grey area between food and art, but if you want to call it cake, shouldn't it be edible? That seems to be the essential element for anything called "cake." I can build a bike that weighs half the current state of the art, but if the gears don't shift, the brakes don't stop it , or it collapses under the weight of a rider, the weight doesn't matter, does it? What about sails that make a boat go incredibly fast but tear in winds over three knots?
When did we get to the point (this cake competition had a $10,000 first prize) of twisting skills like cake decoration from simply making something great, (everybody likes cake,) into something where people pay thousands of dollars for a product that is only aesthetic but is still represented as the real McCoy?
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