Is It Cake?

“So now, for fifteen thousand dollars, what’s it going to be?”

Jamie stooped and squinted at the five objects.

“They’re all so real…”

“They’re as real as wrestlin’, Jamie,” said the host to a ripple of spontaneous amusement from the audience, “but which one is cake?”

Real as wrestling. Jamie knew real when he saw it. When Hulk Hogan hit The Macho Man Randy Savage, hit him square in the eighties (when fifteen grand would have bought a new Corvette), it was real. Really real. The Macho Man staggered like a blasted buck. Stiff legged and rake-in-the-face, reeling real. The reality of Randy’s savage comeuppance had been fiercely debated the next day at school. Its reality was ratified by a (second) real fight. No belt had changed hands, but reality was confirmed and Hulkamania (which gets a red line, Gates is obviously a Warrior fan) lived on.

Thirty-odd years later, the studio lights were bright and Jamie was sweatier that Hogan’s hair.

 “Fifteen seconds!” said the host to the hushed room.

A handbag, a games console control pad, a seashell, an apple and a raw steak. Jamie stared at each of the objects in turn.

Jamie had never scrutinised a handbag in his life. It was pink, some kind of patent leather, or plastic, or fondant? The leather/tempered chocolate strap was folded behind the perfectly stitched quilting of the body of the bag. Maybe. How could anything edible gleam under a studio light like that? Jamie saw the coloured lights of an arcade projected into the stick-bound cloud of candy floss he had carried on the last night of the first holiday he could remember. If a galaxy could be spun in sugar, pink icing could be made to shine like polished pleather.

The control pad. An easier object to cakify, surely? Matt, inert, but then, so precise in its ergonomic curves. How could they? The smooth horns of the hand-friendly shape that guided fingers and thumbs to trigger and stick, linking hand, eye and processor. A recipe for sweet, sweet endorphin release. But was it cake? Were all controllers a form of cake? Was cake a form of controller? Student Jamie had spent a lot more time procrastinating over games controllers than he had over handbags. Didn’t the military use them to control drones these days? Game controllers, not handbags. A man in fatigues rushed to the podium and snatched up the controller. Somewhere over Afghanistan a Predator Drone unleashed a payload of fudge sauce.

The sea shell must be the least likely. Frilled and folded, deeply creased like a Georgia O’Keefe. Ceramically smooth with the colours of a weekday sunset in a soft-focus tiger stripe. Unfakeable, unbakeable? Probably. Was the hermit crab’s mansion more or less difficult to simulate than the clacking plastic of the device that controlled a hermit teenager’s world? Jamie didn’t know, but the handbag was a distant memory.  

“If it’s the sea shell, I’ll marry the baker,” said Jamie. The audience gave a high buzz of appreciation.

“Ten seconds.” snapped the host. “Fifteen thousand dollars.”

Nothing was real in the studio. A Monday afternoon had been dressed up as Saturday primetime. The audience’s emotions were stage managed. The lights were coloured and angled to conceal the truths of mortality and make structures of flour and egg appear intentionally synthetic. The host was a weightless individual doing a meaningless job. The whole thing would be trapped in a loop of perpetual repeats and on-demand escapism. None of it real, except for today, the first time the events would play out, the fifteen grand was real. The bills it would pay were very real. It was a one in five chance.

The apple. Had a delicious piece of natural fruit been turned into a delicious piece of unnatural cake? Was cake unnatural? If you wanted to turn an apple into confectionary you waited until Halloween, stabbed it with a stick, dipped it in hot caramel and left it to go teeth-cracking hard on grease-proof paper. The resulting armoured fruit was as reflective as an expensive pleather handbag under hot studio lights. It had a mix of smooth curves and a perfectly flat plane, where the caramel had pooled on the paper, a combination similar to the games controller. But this was no toffee apple. What Jamie was looking at was a perfect red apple, the skin slightly mottled, yellow-green speckling making it all the more red. A single leaf clung to the stalk screaming of its authenticity. Screaming too loudly?

“Five seconds!”

Five seconds left to work out if a steak was made of cake. Five seconds left to win more money than the net annual earnings from several of Jamie’s previous jobs.

The steak was big. Eat for free, food challenge, get-your-picture-on-the-restaurant-wall big. It glistened under the lights. It had the marbling of mature meat and a sneaker-sole rind. Jamie was hungry. He had been at the studio all day and had been too nervous to eat any of the complimentary buffet. The steak was glistening, it must be moist, but the plate was spotless, not a hint of juice or blood. It wasn’t a real steak! The steak was cake! They had butchered a cake cow to get a sponge sirloin!

Jamie saw the world open up before him like a hot air balloon pilot. He could see the curvature of the Earth. The limits of reality frayed before they reached the periphery of his all-encompassing vision. He knew the truth. The sheen on the bag was too sharp, plus, if it was cake, the creator would have showed off the handle. The artisans on this show did not shrink from difficult details. The controller? An easy mould job. Don’t waste my time. The shell? Impossible. If it was the shell he would lose fifteen grand, but would propose to the genius who created it, would happily spend the rest of his life devoted the alchemist who could conjure such a thing, regardless of any trifles such as gender or any preexisting commitments. The apple? Was it too easy, small and unassuming, flying under the radar? He was tempted by the apple. A serpent of doubt slithered in. A twenty-four-inch-thick python of paranoia. What would Hulk Hogan do?

Hogan was all about protein. Hogan would be enraged that the steak was not real. He would hulk up on that confectionary cow, grab it by the cream horns and slam it through the ring ropes, slicing it into a neat stack of cake steaks.

“Time’s up.” The host moved behind the five objects. He held a large kitchen knife. “You’ve pressed your button, your choice is locked in. Tell us Jamie; what have you gone for?”

“It’s the steak, Mikey.”

The host gave a tic-tac grin, his heavily powdered face dry under the hot lights. Was he real? Was he cake? Cheesecake? He moved towards the steak, eyes twinkling, knife poised. In any other context first responders would have had him in their sights.

“Are you sure, Jamie?”

From the hot air balloon Jamie could see the sun setting over a folded pastel landscape. Lilies and blossoming apple trees surrounded a wrestling ring where an exhausted Hogan hoisted a small pink handbag in victory over a beaten Bill Gates. Jamie was sure it was the steak, but in the hazy distance a Predator drone circled.

“You’ve only had twenty seconds, Jamie. Hardly time to think about anything at all…”

Fifteen grand. The unnecessarily brutal knife hung over the very meaty looking steak.

“…but now we have to ask the most important question of all; is it cake?”