Gay Cakes: A History

As I was upstairs in the kitchen making guacamole at midnight and pondering what my next blog post should be, I thought that maybe I should change the name of my blog to “The Late Night Vegan” because that’s when most of my cooking (well, usually baking, actually) gets done. I’m a night owl, and when I bake at night I don’t have to worry about my parents using or hanging around the kitchen and bugging me, because… well, like normal people, they’re sleeping. Anyway, I decided to keep the title as-is, for now anyway. It’s just something I came up with on the spur of the moment because I couldn’t think of anything else, but I love the alliteration.

Since I am currently camera-less, I can’t really take pictures of the food I make unless my dad is home and feeling kind enough to allow me to borrow his camera. So, unfortunately I won’t be able to blog about the english muffin teese pizzas I made a few days ago… i just couldn’t do them justice without pictures. So I will blog about something that many of you know me for, which is…. gay cakes! I’m going to use this post to go through my personal gay cake-making history and how the gay cake became popular among internet vegans everywhere.

 

Gay Cake: The Original

This cake is the product of the cake decorating unit in my creative foods class last year at school. I did rainbow stripes around the side, the colors ending with a purple peace sign on top (it was more purple in real life, the camera made it look blue). We had to get our designs approved by the teacher before we started decorating, and when I told her I wanted rainbows on my cake she said, “you have to be careful with rainbows though, because these days they have other meanings… like gay and lesbian.”

I… um… wow? I was speechless. I wanted to say, “maybe I want it to mean that!” but didn’t want it to sound wrong. In retrospect, I should’ve just said, “is there anything wrong with that?” but it was first thing in the morning and my brain wasn’t functioning, so I ended up saying “I… like… rainbows?” Incidentally, I got a 100% on the project.

So, I posted about this on the Post Punk Kitchen forums and it earned me the new subnick of “gay cake,” and became somewhat legendary… it’s my avatar on the forums, as well as the picture for the Facebook group The PPK is SO GAY. Oh yeah, and it’s part of the current header image for my blog.

 

Gay cupcakes: An attempt

Based off of wintermitts’s cupgaycakes, I made these cupcakes to hand out at our GSA’s table for the club fair that showed the incoming freshman what clubs they could join. Unfortunately, my pink triangles ended up looking like ham (plus no one knows what a pink triangle means anymore, pfft) and when I opened my container of “rainbow sprinkles” I found out that they were just pale pink, pale yellow, and white. Not rainbow! But at least the colors complimented that of the triangles.

 

Gay Cake II: Hannah Montana

(Photos by Kelly)

This summer, I went to Illinois to visit Kelly. We decided to make a Hannah Montana gay cake, for obvious reasons. The inside is two layers, the bottom layer being chocolate and the top a pink and purple swirl (HM style, ohh yeah!).

She then put a purple border on the cake, and we worked together to pipe rainbows around the side.

For the top, she wrote “Gay Cake” in rainbow colors and stuck in two Hannah Montana cake toppers taken from the cake decorating lab at Piggly Wiggly (Kelly was at the time a cake decorator there). Rainbow sprinkles were added around the top and bottom edges for a final touch.

 

Gay Cake III: Veganstock Summer of Gaycake!

(Photo by Bianca)

Later this summer, I went camping with a bunch of lovely folk from The Post Punk Kitchen forums. I was supposed to bring donuts from Vegan Treats, but waited too long to order and was unable to get them. So what did I do? Stayed up all night baking, of course! I decided that since I was by this point well known for my gay cakes, I would make one for Veganstock, and it ended up to be a better idea than ordering donuts anyway because everyone loved it! A few of us even decided the name of the event needed to be changed from “Veganstock: Summer of Smlove” to “Veganstock: Summer of Gay Cake.”

I stuck with the purple bordering, since that seems to be the color I always use around my gay cakes (also, it’s my favorite color!). Notice that this time, my rainbow sprinkles are actually rainbow colored! I found nicely colored vegan rainbow sprinkles in the bulk bin at Wegmans one day when my friend Jen and I were wandering around the grocery store, so I bought a big bag of them to keep on hand.
There will inevitably be more gay cakes to come in the future, but you’ve now seen a comprehensive history of the ones I’ve already made. I hope you enjoyed it!