Consider the Lamb
or, The Uncanny Power of the Easter Lamb Cake
Before I begin - I’m teaching another class with 177 Milk Street! This time I’m presenting a multi-class intensive: I’ll be covering basic cake skills - creaming, reverse-creaming, and a foolproof chiffon - over three classes during the month of April. You’ll also learn tricks to make caramel, a poured ganache glaze, and easy sugared fruit. The idea is we deep dive into fundamentals, so you’ll be able to tackle any recipe with ease. None of the three cakes we’ll be making are complex layer cakes, and none of them use more than three eggs. I’ll show you how to dress up simple cakes to make them feel really special. We’ll be making:
burnt caramel marble bundt cake (one of my favorite recipes I’ve developed in ages)
an adaptable upside down cake with a secret ingredient
a dramatic (but easy) chiffon cake with sugared fruit (very
inspired!)
You can sign up here, and use MARBLE15 for 15% off. Sessions are from 6-7:30 pm EST on April 2, 16 and 30. The classes are live on zoom, but copies of the class will be emailed to everyone, so no worries if you can’t make one!
On to the lamb!
Consider the Lamb!
I should preface this by saying that I’m not Catholic. I’m not even lapsed! I was raised in the sort of vague mishmash of religious principles popularized by suburban ex-hippie parents in the 80’s and 90’s. We occasionally visited a Christian church to hear music, celebrated Hanukkah each year with a friend of the family, and rarely, if ever, spoke about God.
My mom was brought up as a Disciple of Christ, which mostly seemed to involve her getting dunked in a pond at the age of thirteen in front of her small Texas congregation. My dad, however - the son of a first generation Polish-American mother and an Irish-American factory foreman - was dutifully raised Catholic. As a kid, I remember peering at his confirmation photo with fascination - his serious gaze, with the little gold cross embossed in the corner of the picture. What was the meaning of this mystical rite that had been documented so carefully in the family album? When my childhood best friend showed me pictures of her own confirmation, I was sick with jealousy. There she was, kneeling by the altar, her cartoonishly large blue eyes closed in serene contemplation, dressed all in white! It was so chic! Always congenial, Kristen hosted a private ritual for me in the wood-paneled living room of her family home. With a tiny cup of grape juice and Ritz crackers, we pantomimed the ancient sacrament, a childish blasphemy I accepted with glee. I have always found myself perversely drawn to the mysticism, the camp, the showmanship of the Catholic Church.
I get the irony of a gay person rhapsodizing about Catholicism- a mostly monstrous organization with a smattering of charitable acts to its name (I dig the socialist nuns). What I’m actually advocating for is a blithe cherry-picking of Catholic ritual to suit my own pleasure. This is a way of life in south Louisiana, and I won’t apologize for it. Each year, I celebrate the feast of Epiphany with king cake, run riot in the streets for Mardi Gras, and select a few chaste habits to maintain for Lent. The season culminates in my favorite holiday of the year: Gay Easter.
Twenty-five years ago, a group of local queers organized the first Gay Easter parade. Almost every year since, drag queens in candy-colored suits and Easter hats ride horse-drawn carriages through the streets of the French Quarter, throwing candy to children, tourists, and various riffraff. Spectators craft enormous bonnets and themed headpieces, or drape themselves in pastel costumes. It’s nominally a charitable fundraiser (proceeds go to provide meals for people living with HIV). At its heart remains the peculiar tension the homosexuals of New Orleans embody so well: an embrace of the decorative artifice of religion, and a puckish fuck-you to a church that wouldn’t have us anyway.
It’s in this spirit that two years ago, I baked my first Gay Easter lamb cake. While the scholarship on the history of lamb cake is a bit thin on the ground, I found this passage in a piece by Anne Bramley that sums it up:
“This is how I feel explaining Easter lamb cake to non-believers. Christians have a god who can turn wine into his blood and bread into his flesh, but this deity is also a lamb. At Easter some people transform the holy trinity of flour, sugar, and butter into a heavy batter, shape it into a small wooly ungulate, bake it Sinai dry, and then bring it to life with a sweet buttercream hide, a coconut fleece, and two licorice jelly beans for eyes. And after feasting on ham and deviled eggs, we, the faithful, cut off its head and serve slices of the body all around, communing with each other and with our ancestors. Not quite what is meant by the Eucharistic dictum “do this in remembrance of me,” but there it is.”
An Easter lamb cake has all my top Catholic trappings: a ceremony of mysterious origin, its form at once twee and blood curdling. Is it a replacement for what would have once been a live lamb sacrifice? Are its roots pagan, a callback to the worship of Oestre and her rites of Spring? No one seems to know!
And what is a gay Easter lamb? All lamb cakes are tinged with horror, but a gay Easter lamb refutes simply being cute. Lean into the macabre with your decoration. Tenderly shape its countenance to be deliberately uncanny. Feel the enormous power of using thousand-year-old religious symbolism as your plaything! This is the magic of the lamb cake. And for god’s sake, don’t worry about it looking good.
I’m including a diagram and some photos below to show how I construct a lamb cake without a lamb cake mold (I haven’t yet bitten the bullet on buying the traditional pan, though now I think I must). You’ll need to click on the photos in the gallery below to see the full image. If you go this route, I’d recommend a sturdy pound cake for the base - you need something that will hold up decently well to being skewered.
Easter is in 39 days. If you make a lamb cake, PLEASE show me.
Even odder/more macabre: here in Belgium we have ice cream cakes shaped like a lamb, and when you cut the head off, raspberry coulis comes out like blood.
"Feel the enormous power of using thousand-year-old religious symbolism as your plaything!" - Never was a sales pitch for lamb cake more persuasive than this perfect sentence.