Cakes

In my previous article, I talked about planning ahead and it focused mostly on things I'm planning that will be major investments, such as vacations, renovations, and automobile purchases. Here, I'd like to focus on something a little smaller in scale. Some of my most precious childhood memories were of the event cakes we would get from a local place called Harold's Bakery. A cousin of mine worked there and that meant that I had behind-the-scenes access the likes of which is the most likely origin of my love of baking and pastry arts. Well, it's not the 80s or 90s anymore. The titular owner of Harold's is dead now, the building a furniture store, and I no longer even live in the same state. So I've had to find a cake place in Springfield to continue on the magic and it's gotta be somewhere capable of tolerating my wacky design ideas.

Amycakes has ended up being the Harold's Bakery of my adult life.
I originally heard about them via word-of-mouth amongst my old Drury friends. Basically, the titular Amy was getting her undergrad while I was in graduate school at Drury. Essentially since I moved back here in mid-2010, Amycakes has made all the event cakes for which I have been responsible. As time has gone on, I have found myself ordering cakes from them with ever-growing frequency. Considering they have recently moved into a larger space, I cannot say I am the only one who realizes how awesome they are. With the cakes growing more frequent and complex, I have taken to keeping all the cakes for the year in a single list on the notes app in my phone. Generally, what I find is that it is easiest to divide up event cakes based upon the months when they appear.

January does start things out with no cake though. February does have Valentine's Day, and I wrote a whole article about a tradition I'm starting of getting a cake mocking it every year. March has my stepfather's birthday & St. Patrick's Day, which is good for all the green (my favorite color) it has to offer. April doesn't have anything besides Easter, but I've been goaded into coming up with something. May has my birthday, my mother's birthday, and a close friend's birthday, so that's the watershed month. June is a bust. July has the Fourth, which means a colorful cake, but I usually have nowhere to go. August, there's nothing. September, same thing. October offers Halloween, and that's some of the most fun I have all year. November has Thanksgiving, but no one ever wants a Thanksgiving cake for some reason. December has Christmas and there's all manner of celebrations to take cakes to then. All in all, cakes are some of the most fun things to plan and way cheaper than vacations and the like.

-Frank