Cake or Pie?
Pie is better than cake. There. I said it. Actually, I’ve said it many, many times. Just never here. I consider myself one of the charter members of the “Pie is Better than Cake Club”. So why does cake seem to dominate as the go-to dessert?
A few reasons…
1.) Variance: Good pie is harder to make. The best ones utilize fresh, seasonal fruits. And crust making is an art form. On the other side, cake is just a bunch of flour and sugar and butter thrown together. It is kind of hard to mess that up. Even bad cake is still usually edible. But bad pie? Or, really, crap that isn’t pie but gets call pie (e.g., McDonalds apple “pies”) and poisons the well? Godawful. But pie also has a far greater ceiling. Don’t get me wrong… I’ve had good cake. But there is only so much you can do with cake. Great pie is transcendent. So the range for pie is far greater in large part because we allow a bunch of non-pie crap fill the bottom rungs. But that crap range is where many Americans live for reasons discussed below.
2.) (Related to #1) Geographical bias: For a number of reasons, the American South is better situated when it comes to pie making. This isn’t to say that you can’t get good pie up north (put down the rolling pin, Zic!), just that the South has several advantages. Unfortunately, the South generally doesn’t drive national culture.
3.) Kids: Cake is a more kid friendly treat. The texture is more palatable to them and the sweetness and general simplicity of flavors (again, basically flour, sugar, and butter) appeals to them. So we eat cake as kids and it becomes the norm for us.
4.) Birthdays and other celebrations: You can write “Happy Birthday” on a cake. Or “Congratulations”. Or “I’m Divorcing You” (if you’re the whimsical sort). You can put candles in a cake. You can put race cards or Barney or Anna and Elsa on a cake. You can’t do that on a pie. You can maybe do some crude designs with canned whip cream on a pumpkin pie BUT WHY ARE YOU RUINING GOOD PUMPKIN PIE WITH CANNED WHIP CREAM?!?!
See… this is where the market fails us. The predominance of cake would suggest that it is the superior treat. But it is not. It simply enjoys a wealth of privilege — as outlined above — that gives it unfair and unearned advantages over pie. There are legions of people in this nation who have *never* had good pie. I’ve met them. It’s sad. Band together with me. Help me unseat Big Cake. Let’s make tarts the trendy dessert du jour and eliminate the scourge that is the cupcake chain. Help your fellow Americans enjoy the amazing and uniquely American delicacy that is pie.
What about the Hostess ™ or other types of “pies you can buy that are almost like candy bars”? I love ’em.Report
If you like ’em, eat ’em. But they are poor representations of pie and if they are all you know, I pity you.Report
They’re not all I know, but they’re good. (I like real pie, too, except for certain flavors, which is to be expected.) Also, I used to like the McDonald’s pies before they stopped frying them and took (some of) the saturated fatty goodness from them.Report
You can put race cards on cake? Is that for the Al Sharpton/Jessie Jackson Appreciation Society meetings?Report
No politics! (And, anyway, I think you misspelled “Steve Sailer”.)Report
Oh, yes, forgot that: Steve Sailer’s Al Sharpton / Jessie Jackson Appreciation Society meetings.Report
My wife’s cakes made me doubt the veracity of the claim advanced in the OP. Margarita cake. Bourbon-chocolate cake. Chocolate creme de menthe cake. Chambord raspberry cake. (Her liberal use of booze in cake batter is sort of a trend, of which I approve.)
But ultimately, good pie is indeed better than good cake. The fresh fruit, cooked in sugar and its own juices, produces a purity and intensity of flavor that delights. And, if you want, there’s no reason you can’t booze up a pie!
Where are we classifying cheesecake? Structurally, it more resembles a pie than a cake.Report
I believe that in Spanish, a cheesecake is a “tarta de queso,” or “cheese pie.” So the debate continues.Report
Cakes are better for dessert. Pies should be reserved for juicy meat seasoned and lovingly sealed inside of a coffyn.Report
I prefer cake (chocolate mostly, but there is a bakery down the street that makes a strawberry cane that is irresistable), and cobbler in fact, but a good pie is something special.Report
Last night for our dinner party she made a margarita cheesecake mousse. Cream cheese, ricotta cheese, powdered sugar, unsweetened whipped cream, unsweetened lemon gelatin, tequila, agave nectar, lime juice powder, lime oil, and lime zest. Rich, tangy, and thoroughly delicious! Perfect for afters of a big ol’ plate o ribs, and inducing of a deep carbohydrate coma.
Her next project will be incorporating bacon into her chocolate bourbon cheesecake.Report
Kazzy (or anyone else who wants to answer),
Where do you put pot pies? Are they part of the discussion, or are they too much like a main course to count?Report
I put them well below pot brownies.Report
Argle bargle.Report
@gabriel-conroy
I think that is one of the advantages of pie: it can go savory!
To @damon ‘s point, I would lump those under the broader pie umbrella.
To @burt-likko ‘s point, I never really thought of it but cheesecake (and my mom makes an amazing cheese cake and it is probably my favorite type of ‘cake’ which obviously makes it a pie but it does make you feel like you should be harpooned after eating it) should probably count as a pie provided it has a crust. No crust, no pie.Report
Cake can go savory too. We call that “bread.”Report
I think that is an argument in my favor, Counselor Likko. Cake is just sugar bread. But pie? PIE IS PIE!Report
+3.14159Report
And then how do you categorize Meat Loaf? It’s basically meat cake.Report
I am with you on Pie but every now and then I want a good yellow cake with chocolate frosting and possibly a raspberry filling or a New York Cheesecake. And then there is stuff like Boston Cream Pie which feels like it should be cake but is called a pie.Report
What about Burt’s point above on how cheesecake is kind of like a pie instead of a cake?Report
Cheesecake is not a pie. pie requires crust, not graham bits. Kellogg does not a crust make.Report
“But bad pie? Or, really, crap that isn’t pie but gets call pie (e.g., McDonalds apple “pies”) and poisons the well? Godawful.”
Why do you hate labor working together to unionize our taste buds @kazzy ? Industrial food is the future! Do you feel your tongue is worth more than health care?
“The cries of the children are the cries of victory!”Report
I concur on Pie vs cake.
In order of superiority:
Pie
Ice cream cake
Cake.
Pie: Key Lime, Mincedmeat, pecan.
Ice cream cake: any
Cake: German chocolate, any cheese cake, any regular cake with non whipped cream topping. Best part of cakes-icing roses.
When will we discuss the ranking of crumbles and other baked pie-ish things?Report
Reasonable people can put pie above cake (they are wrong, but they are not necessarily unreasonable). But ice cream cake? What kind of godawful cakes have you been eating your whole life?
If the icing rose is the good part, I think I know what kind of cake we’re talking about, and I agree, that stuff is worse than pie, and maybe even than ice cream cake. But it’s also much much worse than cake.Report
I’m not an ice cream guy (I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it either). Still, I never understood the appeal of an ice cream cake. The ice cream (mostly) retains it’s normal properties but the cake is, well, frozen. I can’t imagine anyone thinking it delicious to freeze a slice of chocolate cake and then dig in to it, but somehow they find it tolerable to do that if ice cream has been injected into the middle.
Gross.Report
Dude, Ice cream cake:
http://www.carvel.com/ice-cream-cakes/celebration-cakes/
It’s not premium ice cream, or gelato, or homemade, which are my preferred, but it’s pretty good. Got the choco and vanilla with a layer of oreo cookie in the middle.
As to icing roses, I’ve always liked the ratio of icing to cake in the 2 to 1 or greater. Yah, the cakes are not that good, but when this is the crap most folks bring in to the office as they are too lazy or unskilled to make it from a box / scratch.Report
@mike-dwyer
See the link above. There is no cake in the ice cream cake. There are versions that do, but, yah, that sucks worse than regular cake. I prefer the all ice cream IC cake.Report
@damon
But if there is no cake, then isn’t it just ice cream? What’s the point of that?Report
@mike-dwyer @damon
Some ice cream cakes have frozen cake. They suck. Carvel makes a masterful cake. If all whales were Fudgie the Whale, not only would I support whaling, but I’d probably rival Mike’s animal kill count.
I think the appeal of ice cream cake is being able to eat ice cream in situations where shoving a bowl full into your face would be looked down upon.
“Hey, it’s noon on a Tuesday… why are you eating a bowl of ice cream?”
-versus-
“Hey everyone! It’s Mary from accounting’s birthday! ICE CREAM CAKE TIME!!!”Report
@mike-dwyer You ever freeze candy bars? Yum.Report
Mike,
it’s ice cream, with graham cracker bits.And godiva on top! what’s not to love?Report
Important distinction: when you say pecan pie, does the word pecan rhyme with can or khan? Because my grandmother has taught me to only trust pee-can pie.Report
PECK-un. (Rhymes with “reckon”.)Report
I have been firmly in the pie camp for years. And I have to say I even love McDonald’s apple pies.
I must also take issue with this:
“Unfortunately, the South generally doesn’t drive national culture.”
Perhaps not in the total sense but I think we’re firmly in the driver’s seat when it comes to cuisine. So of course the many, many pies of the South will hopefully get their day.Report
@mike-dwyer
I think the American South has by far the most local cuisine of any region in the nation. But — until very recently — I don’t think it drove cuisine. I don’t think you had NY or LA or Chicago chefs thinking, “What are they doing down in New Orleans? Or Memphis? Or the Carolinas?” Thankfully, that seems to be changing.
It also has far and away the best desserts… and not just the pies. Good gawd, y’all do dessert right!Report
Tsap Tsui (chop suey) is local to the Pacific Northwest (and fortune cookies to san francisco).
The mid-atlantic has Italian American food.
I don’t think the south’s cuisine is terribly local — they have goobers, for god’s sake, and those are from Africa, and collards and those are from Italy, and syllabub, and that’s from England and … the list goes on.Report
@kim
I agree most of the South’s cuisine is derived from other countries, but for the sake of this discussion I think it’s fair to say ‘southern desserts’ lean in the pie direction, though it’s certainly not exclusive.
And we haven’t even touched the love of jello-based desserts in the midwest.Report
Mike,
*shudders* jello, the quivering desert.
Southern cake is better than northern cake, though!Report
Pie is better than cake. I didn’t think it even needed to be said.
The percent of cakes I’m honestly, genuinely interested in eating or even trying is like 18 or maybe 23. It’s like 69 percent of pies.Report
Following @saul-degraw above, I do like nice, moist white cake with raspberry layer dividers and light cream frosting.Report
Shmoo cake.
Sachertorte.
Fruitcake (the real stuff with a quarter inch of marzipan under the icing, dried fruit and most of a bottle of rum in it, not some abomination with candied maraschino cherries).
These things are not merely good – they are better than pies. All pies.Report
You’ve never had a true sour-cherry pie, made with tapioca. It is Divinity on a Plate.Report
There’s no need to resort to the No True Pie fallacy, Kazzy. Pie is so vastly superior to the tarted-up bread we call cake that the good pies can carry the Hostess fruit pies and win anyway. Besides, grocery-store birthday cakes.Report
I think pies and cakes fulfill different culinary needs. One isn’t necessarily better than the other. Pies might be more difficult to make but they also provide a more simple joy than a cake. Pies are more homey of a dessert, especially if it is a good apple or cherry pie. Cakes are when you want something with an air of sophistication or complication even if they are technically easier to make than a pie. Many of the great cakes like the Sacher torte or even the simple ones like Saul described have an air of elegance and beauty to them.Report
TAKE YOUR GODDAMN CAKE SNOBBERY AND HIT THE BRICKS, @leeesq .
I’m actually only part-joking about that. I do think we have attached an air of sophistication to cakes because many of them are borne out of European pastry work as opposed to pies which are a largely American, Southern, and ‘home-y’ style dessert. But I think that is in error. The best pies can rival if not surpass the best cakes in terms of depth and complexity of flavor, sophistication, and ornateness.
There is nothing elegant about grocery store birthday cake. There is nothing elegant about cake out of a box. Or cake with unfunfetti in it. There is nothing elegant about overly rich frosting designed to mask the dryness and blandness of dessert bread.Report
There is about as much elegance to those things as there is depth and complexity of flavor in a Tenderflake crust with canned pie filling gooped in it.
Bad cakes exist, bad pies exist – but we’re not comparing the average pie to the average cake, with each category’s ratio of around 10 poor-to-middling to 1 good? We’re comparing good cakes to good pies.Report
@kazzy cakes allow for a degree of artistry in both presentation and taste that pies do not. You can combine a variety of flavors better into a cake than you can into a pie. With a cake, you can also create a truly dazzling piece of work that is great to look at and eat. A pie always looks like a pie.Report
Lee,
You know little about pies, I am certain.
I have made many pies, and few look alike. True, they all look like a pie, but that simply means my canvas is flat… like the top of a cake. I can doodle whatever I want on top, or use crust cutouts, or lattices.
You don’t even know the proper top for a plum pie, I’d wager. (Every fruit has a different classic top).Report
@leeesq
That is part of my beef. Presentation isn’t unimportant, but we’ve allowed ourselves to be snookered in by Big Cake and their style-over-substance approach!Report
Who thinks the American South came up with pies? Pies are an English invention, taken by the Cavaliers to the American South.Report
I must echo Kim in that any attempt to claim pie as american is absurd and almost risable. Pie’s are old old old, far older than our fine republic; likely older than the first republic.
That said I think you are fundamentally correct that pie is superior to cake. I would, personally, classify cheesecake as cake (unless it has been poured into a pastry shell in which case I suppose there can be some debate. Boston cream pie is also cake.Report
@north
I’m referring more to perception. When we think of pies — in their best form — we think of them sitting on windowsills. When we think of cakes — in their best form — we think of French pastry chefs.Report
Oddly when I think of pies I think of my Grandmother (divine breads also have this association) and when I think of cakes I think of my mother (even though she is an excellent bread maker and pie maker).Report
Do we? My french pastry shop down the street makes a mean eclair — and wow, their bavarois!
But… cakes? Nah…
You have your Southern Cakes, all grease and moist, and your Northern Cakes, dry and flaky.
You have your eastern european gingerbread/spice cakes. And your Korean cakes, with buttercream. There are so many things that are cakes, I wouldn’t put French anywhere on the list. I do need to try an actual German Black Forest Cake — with real sour cherries.Report
Yeah, but we filled them with fruit instead of eels.Report
From my understanding, BB, the greeks filled theirs with dates and figs.Report
Fine .We fill ours with fruit that doesn’t suck.
That was just a Simpsons reference, but apparently eel pie is a real thing.Report
Figs are awesome fruit. Also, the apple and other fruit pies existed in England.Report
Cake is an excuse to eat frosting; pie is an excuse to eat fruit. Fruit is better. Hence, pie is better.Report
I frequently scrape the frosting off of my cake and throw it away.Report
I won’t usually scrape it off unless it’s egregious, but I do reach for the slices with minimal frosting.Report
Depends on the frosting. If it’s one of those cheap frostings from a plastic jar, or the kind often found on grocery store cakes, where you can feel the sugar crystals in your mouth, I toss it.
But some frostings can be sublime treat.Report
A good, buttery frosting can be delicious, for sure.
There is a place here that makes a strawberry gateau that has amazing pastry cream frosting. I definitely don’t scrape that off, except possibly straight into my mouth. If it weren’t so damned expensive, I’d buy one every week.Report
The best frosting is whipped cream.Report
Bad cake is an excuse to eat frosting. But frosting is also kind of nasty – most any cake improved by frosting is a bad cake not worthy of consideration here.Report
True. There is good and bad cake, good and bad frosting. But there’s no such thing as bad fruit. (Except for bad fruit.)Report
I just described a rather delicious cake with fruit. So, if the benefit of pie is in the fruit, and cake can have fruit too, cake wins. Q.E.F.D.Report
Chris,
a pie expects the fruit to be the star. That’s what makes it better — when done with the best produce you can find. Out of season? Sure, take a cake. A cake wants to share the show with the fruit.Report
I challenge the notion that cake is easy to make.
Cake mixes are easy to make. And they have qualities that we perceive as good cake. But they are not good cake.
Good cake is not easy. It’s a very precise set of chemical reactions that have to take place in the right sequence and at the right temperature and the correct cooling sequence to turn into good cake. It’s not easy at all.
Now I love me some good pie, and I’m quite skilled at making good pie. But I never make cakes. To be good at it, it’s something you have to do regularly, expecting some failures; and those failures teach you a whole lot more about how to make good cake then mediocre successes, so I fully encourage anyone interested in making good cake to make plenty of bad ones, too.
And therein lies the problem. Most of us are unwilling to throw cake away, and so we eat it. And that shit’s okay in small quantities, but in cake-sized quantities on a regular basis, it’s lethal.
So I have two answers. Eat pie at home, good pie you don’t make is hard to come by. And leave the cake making to people who practice it regularly, and when you encounter it, eat a piece. Even bring a piece or two home. And don’t bother if it wasn’t made by someone who makes cakes as a serious profession and knows exactly how to make a good cake because they bothered to make plenty of bad ones on the path to really, really good cake.
(And cheese cake is not cake, it is its own beast, and worthy of its own goodness as a totally separate entity.)Report
A good spice cake’s a pleasure, and not terrible hard to make. Ditto with Honey Cake.
There are the multi-layer monstrosities that you’ve got to make with cake flour, and take precision.
If you’ve got to make a cake, make it Strawberry Shortcake — in season.Report
Eat pie at home, good pie you don’t make is hard to come by. And leave the cake making to people who practice it regularly, and when you encounter it, eat a piece.
I heartily endorse Zic’s comment.Report
When living in LA, we had a house. Our house had a double oven. Our friends were far from their families. Ergo: we hosted Thanksgiving for all the orphans.
In the interest of visual impact (rather than true culinary excellence), I bought a large chicken roaster thing and made an apple pie in it that used upwards of forty apples. Gigantic. People muttered religious imprecations or hummed the five “Close Encounters” notes. Good pie, not great. But then, good apple pie fresh from the oven is always pretty special and it was huge. I have actually made very, very good apple pie in normal sizes.
But I have never, ever been able to make a cake from scratch that was as good as a cake from a mix. Don’t know why, just haven’t.
@kim I will try a spice cake. And strawberry shortcake is one of the unexpected Miracles of God. Particularly the way that strawberries and sugar mixed in a glass vessel devolves into a lush crimson nectar.Report
For a truly easy cake to make, try a pound cake.Report
A good pound cake is a thing of beauty. My grandma made one that was amazing.Report
Cake or pie? Yes, please.
Sorry to be so indecisive, but there you go…Report
My son drew a cake that was topped with a cupcake the other day. This could be the next frontier in cake technology.Report
Honestly surprised there are so many pie people around here. My mum was never one of them, so I didn’t have a pie until I was out of her house.Report
Death, please. No, cake! Cake! Cake! Sorry. Sorry…Report
Adam Carolla has been saying this for years.
I might make an exception for cheesecake, but I don’t think of cheesecake as cake per se.Report