Freezing Your Cake

My grandma archives food. Her pantry contains foods which literally expired last millenium. She fills her freezer chests with unlabeled takeout containers, desserts from Trader Joe's, and half-full slush drinks from Starbucks/Costco/Jamba/etc. I am unsure whether to consult Marie Kondo, an archaeologist, or a priest.

True story: my wife once found a cat in her great aunt's refrigerator. They loved that cat but couldn't find the time to cremate its remains.

Today is May 18, 2026. This is the top of my ideas.txt file, where I store one project/essay/etc idea per line. It is 6,564 lines long. Entries like /scissor point to external files; I'm sitting on ~2MB of unpublished plaintext notes. I expect to die in ~4 decades.

I will never make a serious dent in this list, and that's not the point. It fulfills me to imagine, to curate, to tinker, and to sketch. Sometimes I even share my ugly little darlings with others.

Or that's what I tell myself. To publish my work is to admit "this is the best I can do". It's easier to hide my mediocrity in the freezer. "It's not a failure; I'm just not finished yet."

There is nothing wrong with being a chronic tinkerer nor a completionist. But it is difficult to be both. You cannot freeze your cake and eat it too.

There's a tradition of saving the top tier of a wedding cake and eating it on your first anniversary.

When I make wedding cakes, I'd rather they not have freezer-burned cake ruining their memory. I promise them a duplicate of the top tier on their anniversary.

One pair of friends froze it anyway. And… six years later, after the divorce, we pulled it out of the freezer. It was perfect; the fresh raspberries in the filling looked like they were picked yesterday.

Maybe it's because it was a fondant-covered cake. I don't usually do fondant, because as pretty as it is, nobody wants to eat it. It seemed appropriate for this couple, though in retrospect maybe that should have been a sign.

-- jfengel