Shulman - Sitting in bars with cake: lessons and recipes from one year of trying to bake my way to a boyfriend

Editor: Camaren Subhiyah
Designer: Darilyn Lowe Carnes
Production Manager: Anet Sirna-Bruder

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014945996

ISBN: 978-1-4197-1582-2

Text copyright 2015 by Audrey Shulman
Illustrations copyright 2015 by Jennifer Orkin Lewis

Published in 2015 by Abrams Image, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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DISCLAIMER

The people who appear in this book are based on my sugar-fueled, alcohol-addled memories of meeting guys in crowded, noisy bars well after my bedtime. Some recollections may be a little hazier than others, so please excuse any imprecision and enjoy the show.

For Chrissy and Katy,
who are way better than boyfriends.

CONTENTS

Dear friends,

Im so delighted youre interested in reading about my year of baking and bar-hopping to bait a boyfriend. Or maybe youre just in the market for new cake ideas. Either way, I hope youll get a kick out of these retellings and recipes as if youd been accompanying me on my cake exploits. (Im sorry we didnt know each other then, or else I would have invited you to join.)

Here are some things you should know:

Before last year, I could probably count the number of beers Id had on one hand. Youd be more likely to find me making a Jell-O mold than doing Jell-O shots, cohosting murder mystery parties in the comfort zone of my apartment as opposed to driving around Los Angeles at all hours of the night trying to pick up guys in bars. I didnt know how to pick up guys, well, anywhere.

Then one summer, all that changed. My best friend, Chrissy, decided to have her birthday party at a bar, and as the self-appointed baker of our friend group, I brought along a cherry cake I had made from scratch. I was in the middle of cutting and serving pieces for our friends when I looked up to see that all of the guys across the bar were staring at me, and staring at my cake, silently formulating the best way to come over and ask for some. As someone who took prescription medicine for sweaty hands until well after college, this was a rather startling moment of discovery for me.

Holding a cake = guys want to talk to you.

Let me back up just a minute so you can fully grasp the importance of this revelation. I grew up being that girl with bad bangs on the bar mitzvah circuit who no one asked to dance. I never had a straight date to prom and wasted far too many months in college crying over boys who quickly lost interest in me after realizing I was more like a first-grade teacher than a tortured artist with loose morals. I thought maybe my luck would change after graduation, and Id finally score a boyfriend when I moved to a bigger city and became a more assertive adult. Maybe people would stop giving me grow-a-boyfriend kitsch for Valentines Day and my aunt would stop sending me dating self-help books. Maybe I would finally connect with the right person and everything would just work out.

So I tried to put myself out there. I went on a flurry of online dates. I let people set me up. I tried dating a friend and even someone from work, but there was never any lasting success. I couldnt tell if I wasnt meeting the right people (maybe) or if something was wrong with me (probably). As much as I didnt want to admit it, there was some ocean-size progress to be made in the getting-comfortable-around-boys department. So that night, as I stood in the bar holding my cake on its flimsy little tray, I had an epiphany.

Homemade cake was the icebreaker of the century.

I could go up to any guy in the bar under the pretense of offering him a slice; it was just like hosting a party at someone elses house. My friends watched as I approached every boy within spitting distance, maintaining previously unimaginable periods of eye contact because now I had a conversation piece, and it didnt really matter if I was blushing because the guys were too busy eating cake to notice.

People go inexplicably insane when offered free dessert.

You made this?! the boys asked, their mouths full. Are you an angel?! By the end of that night, I had talked to more guys over cake than I had during the entirety of my undergraduate career. Chrissy joked that all I needed to do to find a boyfriend was bake cakes and go sit in bars. I thought this was hysterical, but not something I could actually go through with. It implied a certain amount of kitchen labor and bravery, not to mention spending more time in the foreign territory of bars.

The rest of the year went by, and I was still single and still tired of it. I really didnt feel like making an online dating profile again and wasnt quite ready to call it quits and throw myself into full-fledged spinsterhood. So in an uncharacteristically brazen disregard for rational action, I decided I would go back to what had worked for me: I would meet guys by taking cakes to bars on a regular and relentless basis. I just wouldnt go to the same bar twice, lest I give up the whole charade.

It sounded like a feasible strategy: bake fifty cakes and take them to fifty bars over the course of a year, offering pieces to potential boyfriends until one surfaced. If I was still single when it was all said and done, at least I would know I had made a pretty valiant effort to not be.

So I did it.

I did it for an entire year, you guys.

I took fifty freaking cakes around town and spent a billion dollars on confectioners sugar. And now I have eight cavities and a helluva lot of stories to prove it, this book being a collection of my very favorite encounters.