A $75-M cake? Ya don’t say! Can ya beat that?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/03/2018 (3029 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It appears that I have run out of uncles.

This sad fact was relayed to me over the weekend when my older brother called from the West Coast to inform me that our last living uncle, Donnie, had passed away just four months after we chatted with him at our mother’s wake in Vancouver.

My mom and her large assortment of siblings shared a lot in common in the sense they were fun-loving, kind-hearted, larger than life and very, very loud.

This was especially true of my Uncle Billy, who would react with ear-splitting shock and awe back in the day when we teenagers would proudly inform him of the extravagant price tags attached to some of our treasures.

“Hey, Uncle Billy,” I would chirp years ago. “These sneakers cost over $100.”

Hearing this, Uncle Billy’s eyes would grow to the size and shape of manhole covers and he would loudly snort his oft-repeated catchphrase: “(Expletive deleted) YA DON’T SAY! CAN YA BEAT THAT?!”

It’s been years since he passed away, but I often channel my Uncle Billy’s spirit whenever I am confronted with something that I think is absurdly overpriced.

Take the other day, for instance, when I volunteered to bring a cake to a birthday bash with a bunch of friends. That prompted me to wander into a fancy new bakery that I’d never visited before.

“I’m looking for a cake,” I told the lovely woman behind the counter, because I am the sort of hard-hitting journalist who believes in getting directly to the point of the matter.

The clerk politely explained they didn’t have any on hand at that particular moment, but they could probably whip something up if I wanted to wait. That is when she revealed how much I would have to pay if I wanted to get my mitts on one of these upscale goodies.

“We have a four-inch cake for about $40,” she said, beaming. “And we have a seven-inch cake for about $70. Or there’s an eight-inch cake for $80. What would you like?”

Look, I am a reasonably worldly person, but I was somewhat taken aback in the sense that I did not become an overweight, late-middle-aged crusading newspaper columnist by forking out $10 for every inch of cake I consume.

This is pretty much when the infamous words of my late Uncle Billy popped into my brain.

“(Expletive deleted) YA DON’T SAY! CAN YA BEAT THAT?!” I snorted while slowly backing away from the bakery’s glass display case.

“Didn’t you want a cake, sir?” the clerk asked as I beat a hasty retreat to the door.

Clutching my wallet tightly, I smiled a brave little smile and mumbled something about how I would have to check with my wife before I spent that much on a cake, or a new vehicle, then sprinted back to my car.

When I got home, my wife made clucking noises with her tongue to indicate that, indeed, those had been some mighty pricey cakes, and it would make a lot more financial sense for her to whip one up herself to take to the party, so that’s what she did.

While she was mixing the icing, which contained a generous helping of chili-chocolate-flavoured Kahlua coffee liqueur, I parked myself at the home computer and, what with being a big-shot journalist, began doing some cake-related research.

This involved Googling the words “really expensive cake.” I stumbled on news reports about a cake that cost more than your entire house and several high-tech fighter jets combined.

Sold to a buyer in the United Arab Emirates, it was packed with diamonds and hand-sculpted fondant and was created by British designer Debbie Wingham, who rose to fame when she crafted the world’s most expensive dress, festooned with diamonds, for US$17.7 million.

Wingham’s record-setting cake was a two-metre-long depiction of a runway fashion show that weighed nearly 450 kilograms, as compared to a typical mature grizzly bear, which would weigh roughly 410 kilograms.

The cake took the designer more than 1,100 hours to finish, considering all the tiny edible figurines were hand-sculpted and sported exact replicas of Wingham’s couture clothing and accessories.

When I was a kid, the fun birthday-party trend involved hiding spare change (fun fact: I once almost choked on a quarter) inside the cake.

In contrast, Wingham’s cake contained (prepare to be possessed by the spirit of my Uncle Billy) 4,000 diamonds, including a 5.2-carat pink diamond, a 6.4-carat yellow diamond and 15 five-carat white diamonds, with those 17 stones alone worth more than $45 million. There also were 400 one-carat and 73 three-carat white diamonds, along with 75 three-carat black diamonds on the cake’s runway.

Filled with righteous indignation, and a modest slice of envy, I described this diamond-mine of a cake to my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, as she popped her more reasonably priced version into the oven.

“So what did it cost?” is what she wanted to know.

I smiled and snorted: “It cost $75 million! I’m not kidding. It’s the most expensive cake ever.”

My wife grinned an evil grin and gushed: “YA DON’T SAY! CAN YA BEAT THAT?!”

And somewhere, I like to think, my mom and all her brothers were smiling.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca