# 1: Choices.
How do you decide which kind of cake to pick? On what basis must your choice be made? Of course, there are the usual – flavour, texture, taste. But choosing what kind based on those parameters necessarily needs you to know which aspect of cake you like best and would want more of. Sometimes, confronted with a limited choice, you just take what you can get irrespective of what you might want; and of course, sometimes, with a wide variety of cake before you, your choices can get tangled up in more than just the factors mentioned above.
# 2: Categories of taste.
Of course, cake is never generic, but it can be categorised. There’s the basic good cake, and bad cake. And cake that might be good at first but can be bad for you in the long run. And cake that is an acquired taste. But at any given moment, confronted by the choice outlined above, how do you know which cake to choose? Momentary judgements are all well and good, but once you’re a regular at a particular bakery, how can you, with a clear conscience, switch to another on a whim? And anyway, making the choice takes some amount of determination and judgement, and when you simply don’t know what kind of cake you want, you can be indiscriminate and just take the first one you see – but then, you might go home and realise it was a bad choice and now you’re stuck with a huge cake you don’t really want but have to eat anyway.
# 3. Favourites.
Over time, you tend to grow into a particular flavour/category of cake. It’s comforting, it’s easy, and you know, ideally, that a triple layered Lindt chocolate cake with pretty swirls on top and chunks of chocolate is what you want. But, when you enter a bakery in the expectation that this is what you will find, all you see is an ordinary two layered cake with fresh cream chocolate frosting. It’s not bad, but it isn’t what you would have ideally wanted. And it grows stale far too quickly. On the other hand, it just might grow on you – while your decadent Lindt cake might have been too rich to consume on a regular basis anyway.
#4. Variety
So, you’ve found a cake you like. It’s good for you, isn’t too rich or too dry, and has been keeping well in the fridge so far. But then, you happen to pass the bakery and see a new cake sitting there, calling out to you. Do you cheat on the cake you have back home, sitting in the fridge, by sneaking in for a slice, or do you turn your head, ignore this new cake and go on?
A little bit of variety never hurt anybody, did it?
…so, what do you do?
How do you decide what cake you want?
Don’t ask me, I still haven’t figured that one out.




