You know, I can turn down a piece of cake.*
(I mean, in theory I can; it seems well within the universe of possibilities. I don’t recall that I ever have turned down cake, but that’s a different question.)
But my neighborhood grocery/delicatessen has hit upon a remarkably effective marketing scheme that renders me powerless to resist their cake. In the bakery case next to the carrot cake, the chocolate cake, the cheesecakes and brownies and other moderately tempting slices, they display a few pieces of cake frosted as Birthday Cake.
Oh. The humanity.
It’s plain old dark chocolate cake with vanilla-esque frosting, a thick slick coat of frosting as white as snow, as white as virtue, as white as shortening and corn syrup and confectioner’s sugar can make it. This fatty white canvas is bedecked with swags of Windex-blue scalloped edges and punctuated with leaves and fat frosting roses, sometimes yellow, sometimes pink.
It is Birthday Cake. I cannot resist it. I keep buying it. When I examine this logically, I admit to myself that my sweet tooth would be better satisfied with a candy bar or an orange or a cookie or or or.
But this has nothing to do with logic. It’s Birthday Cake. I want Birthday Cake.
They are geniuses.
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