Let’s be real, pie is reserved for those special times of the year filled with high calories where you still want sweet sugary dessert but don’t want to look like a glutton.
Cake on the other hand, is used for those ‘me’ days. Those days where you say I was born this day, I made it through school, or I just plain earned it. It is the ultimate indulgence that follows a grand celebration.
American pop culture alone has embraced cake more than it ever did pie. Surely when you think of reality tv and food TLC’s Cake Boss or Food Network’s Cake Wars comes to mind along with Kitchen Nightmares or Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.
When researching shows with the theme of pie on networks such as the Cooking Channel, PBS, TLC, Food Network, and WE tv there are only two pie shows in total to watch. A total of 12 purely cake oriented shows are to be found with an additional 2 cupcake shows. That’s a 1:7 ratio of shows in favor of cake as a subject.
Even from a homemade baking perspective cake is both highly sanitary and highly efficient.
When looking at a classic vanilla cake recipe and a blueberry pie recipe on Food Network’s website it is apparent that when baking from scratch cake only takes 25 minutes less. Cake yields a greater serving size overall with 12 servings compared to an average of 9 servings from pie.
For the process of the actual dough, with cake you merely have to mix all of the ingredients in a bowl and place it in the appropriate pans for a double layer cake. With pie you are required to not only mix, but roll out the dough, and arrange it in a pan then repeat the process for the top crust.
Now imagine, with cake there is a period of mixing and placing the cake in pans to be baked where they sit unexposed to the bakers hand completely. With pie, you have to mix, roll, and touch the dough to create the food. What germs does the baker’s hands have on them when handling the food? How long does the filling sit exposed to the air where hair and other unseemly particles can land inside for you to eat?
The real area where cake is truly a league above pies is in the process that comes after baking.
With a pie you merely take it out of the oven, slap it on a plate and add some whipped cream. Maybe you add some food coloring to the process but mostly it is a sad circle of dough and filling.
With cake you are exposed to an overabundant opportunity to truly create a statement with edible designs, objects, sculpting, and personalized lettering. There are whole websites dedicated to the art of decorating and expressing artistry through cakes.
If pies were really so great we wouldn’t relate it to 3.14159.
