Let them eat cake

On my first trip to the United States we were in San Francisco when the US Fathers' Day coincided with the birthday of the Only-begotten children's mother, and she decided we should get a cake to celebrate the joint event. So we went out for a walk to locate a cakery. We noted that US cakes were considerably more imaginative than the usual Swedish choices of Black Forest Cake and Princess cake, often making up entire stages with dinosaurs in primeval forests, Dorothy with friends on the Yellow Brick Road and so on. We still settled for a fairly simple chocolate cake. I, having just withdrawn cash, took out a fifty-dollar note to pay with at which the guy behind the counter hissed:
“Put that down! Do you want to get killed!?”
Oh, apparently I hadn't gotten the current USD/life rate right.
I found smaller denominations to pay with and then we repaired to our hotel room.

I had a little bit of cake and found it very rich. The OBCM, considering herself a major league cake-eater, had a larger bit but had obvious difficulty finishing it all.
“It's (oof) rather rich…”
We looked at the cake, its full caloric content now apparent to us, realising we wouldn't ever be able to finish it. Accordingly we invited all our travelling companions. They eagerly took a piece of cake each and their widening eyes showed they also found it quite rich. After some forty male engineering students in the prime of their lives had had a piece of cake each we still had half the cake left. We decided it would probably do as a tip for the cleaning staff.

Since then, I consider American cake as a weapon of waist destruction. There is a blog dedicated to other kinds of cake-related disasters: Cake Wrecks.