Why do wedding cakes usually suck?

I've probably had a good slice of wedding cake, but I can't recall it. My wife and I went to some length to make sure ours was better than average - we ordered carrot cake w/ cream cheese icing, figuring that we'd have better odds if we could avoid entirely the words "butter cream" and "genoise" - but, in the event, it was disappointing. Don't take this personally,but in all likelihood, your wedding cake sucked, too.

But why? I'm about to spend all day on an airplane in order to attend a wedding, so I have vested interest in the answer. On the face of it, the problem is not a budget constraint: We Americans spend, by most counts, between $3 and $5 per slice on our wedding cakes. A slice of cake from a quality baker generally costs a bit more than that, but I've had plenty of very good slices of cake for that sort of price, and that is by the slice. Clearly there are economies of scale to cakes: The cost of the ingredients may be roughly proportional to the number of servings, and perhaps even declining, because you use less frosting per unit of cake as the cake gets larger (butter costs more than flour, and ratio of surface area to volume should fall with size); and the larger input, labor, should clearly exhibit increasing returns to scale (it takes no more time to bake 2 layers than 1).

So if we spend enough to get a good cake, why do so often fail to do so?

In praise of street food

What could be a more proximal kitchen, at least from the consumer's perspective, than street food? In my own cooking, I generally think about the proximity of my primitive food sources to my kitchen, but the cart warrior offers another perspective: He (or she) cooks it fresh, all day long, right in front of you, not in some glass-walled, Michelin-starred kitchen, but on the sidewalk. I don't know about you, but I reckon whipping up massive quantities of super tasty food, on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, without giving your customers food poisoning, with Mobius-like repetitive consistency, is one of the great culinary feats of our times. I mean, seriously, are you kidding me? The best of the best of the street food community - not to be confused with the ones serving stale pretzels and three-day-old boiled hot dogs, I mean the ones preparing food of real quality, fast, cheap, and on the street - is, if you'll excuse the language, the effing bomb.

This particular thread occurred to me because the finalists for the Vendy - the biggest award in the street food hierarchy, the moral equivalent of a third Michelin star or a food-tops rating in Zagat's - were just announced. If you're not familiar with NYC street food, and you get the opportunity, I highly recommend working off of NY Mag's list of the Concrete Elite (it is to the undying credit of the city and the vendors that this list, while dated, remains virtually unchanged by either name, location, or qualitative scale). Seriously, the Vendys are fine, but why bother buying tickets and fighting the throngs on Governor's Island? If you had the choice, would you rather have Thomas Keller cooking for you in his own kitchen at the French Laundry, or at some kitschy demo for the Food Network? I say, go to the carts. You can do unfathomable arterial damage well inside of a 10-block radius in midtown, so why mess with it?

I have not had the pleasure of eating at any of this year's finalists, but I was in NYC last month, and I made a point of visiting what I take to be The Best Halal/Gyro In The Known Universe, the guys on the southwest corner of 53rd St and 6th Ave. There are dozens of impostors, and many within a one-block radius, so if you go, be sure to check the corner; you'll know when you're there, because the line is longer than the competition by a thoroughly justifiable order of magnitude. What other gyro-style stand has its own Wikipedia page? Who else make lamb-on-rice so good that you can get knifed for cutting in line (yes, it really happened). Where else have the customers taken to referring to the white sauce as "crack sauce"? Trust me, it's worth it.

I'm sure the other guys (they are almost exclusively guys, sorry) have their own merits, but if I were to do the street-meat tour, and I faced either temporal or gastrointestinal constraints, I would - in addition to the Halal gurus above - make sure to stop by Rolf's Hallo Berlin sausage cart at 54th and 5th (between the Democracy Special and the Dictator Special, you can't go wrong) as well as Mohammed Rahman's Kwik Meal at 45th and 6th (the only street chef I know of who trained at the Russian Tea Room and marinates cubes of lamb - not pressed into gyros, fresh cubes - in his own concoction of papaya juice to tenderize it - be sure to try it with a side of his freaky, very hot, not-quite-Middle-Eastern green jalapeno chili sauce).

Pie for Breakfast

Championship Brunch: pie, coffee, Mimosa

Come-clean: This is not my pie. In point of fact, I don't really do sweets and, with the notable exception of pizza, I rarely bake. Suffice it to say that we all have our place in the kitchen, and mine is not at the pastry station.

Which is by way of saying how exceedingly fortunate I am to have married a woman who can bake her butt off, because just saying the word "pie" makes me happy. Seriously, until you've had one of my wife's pies, your gastronomic bucket list will remain at least partially incomplete. She has no weak suit: My birthday happily coincides with our own lemon crop, so Lemon Meringue has always been my personal favorite. But they are all exceptional: Chocolate Pudding (filled with a homemade dark chocolate custard), Apple (which I otherwise don't even eat), and - one of the Himalayan peaks of the pie-baking landscape - Mixed Berry, defined by whatever local berries are currently at their peak, and what I was lucky enough to have for breakfast this past Sunday.

What makes a great pie? The trivially obvious: A great crust (consisting, as I understand it, of all of three ingredients, flour, fat and salt), and a great filling (which can be relatively complex, as in puddings, as well as incredibly simple, as in most fruits). It is this very simplicity which belies the difficulty in achieving pie-greatness:

Just-filled with Middleton Farms' berries

• Consisting of almost nothing while demanding great attention to small technical details, a great crust offers the cook boundless opportunity to screw things up; the crust must remain structurally sound in the oven, it must cook evenly, and it must not only be flaky - both light and rich, crunchy and soft - but it should exhibit the same flakiness on the bottom as it does on the top. When it comes to crusts, technique is everything.
• Fillings are similarly unforgiving, if for different reasons: When it comes to filling a pie, there is nowhere to hide. No amount of sugar, lemon juice, and stove-top wizardry will impart flavor to bland berries, texture to mealy apples, or the scent of a perfectly ripe Meyer to bitter lemon juice. When it comes to fillings, there is no way around the imperative to start with great fruit. 

My advice, as a non-participant in the pie kitchen, is this: First, buy the best fruit you possibly can. Almost any fruit can make a great pie, but no great pie can be made from fruit of poor quality. (Please don't list for me the virtues of instant pudding mixes. They have their place, but not in homemade pie. If you are going to roll out your own crust, then by all means, cook your own custard.) Second, read up on pie crusts, paying particularly close attention to the technicalities of temperature and speed (see McGee or Corriher, for instance - and sorry for the AMZN plug, I don't care where you buy it, the link is just to get you the title).

And last, but most certainly not least, always save a slice for breakfast.