Vikings are the new Ninjas anyway.

I was informed shortly after getting engaged that it is a tradition for the newly married to save the top tier of their wedding cake. A year later, they are to consume this cake for good luck or to enhance virility or some other nonsense. Like everything else involved with the planning of the wedding, I quietly nodded my head in agreement and obeyed the orders of fiancé/mother/mother-in-law. Fortunately, as I was in little condition to save anything, someone put the cake in a little box after the wedding and transported it home. It may have been the box that was booted across the parking lot by a tilted guest.

Smart cake handlers, like my parents-in-law, would store this prize in a sealed,air-tight container and then pack it in the freezer. Not smart cake ruiners, like us, would store this prize in a drafty, ill-wrapped piece of cellophane and then dump it into the crisper next to the beer and giant bottles of condiments. (Which will never be used cuz ketchup is gross.) Fortunately, for the first year of its confection-ated life, our little cake baby stayed with grandma and grandpa. Last year, on our paper anniversary, we cracked into the Tupperware and delighted in its frozen, if not a little stale, goodness. This sacrifice surely means good luck will be on our heads for years to come.

(I assumed that this entire practice was some manner of fate massaging that’s meant to bring good fortune to the couple. Apparently this isn’t so. The story behind squirreling away of part of the cake was less of an attempt at good luck and more of a scheme to save a few bucks at a child’s christening. A christening that would have occurred a year (9 months + 3 months) after the wedding night’s consummating. “Hey! There’s no need to make a new cake for the baby’s latest sacrament. We have a perfectly good, year old one right here!” It now holds no real purpose for today’s Vizsla-owning, baby-hating super couples. According to this website on wedding cake history, it now merely “serves as a very pleasant reminder of what was their very special day.” Pleasant reminder! Great!)


Because the levity surrounding our one year anniversary was so overwhelming, the G and I were not really aware that the remaining leftover cake had not been thrown away but instead placed in the backseat of our car. It seems father-in-law no longer wanted it taking up room in the freezer. Cake made its way into our refrigerator, now in the drafty, ill-wrapped piece of cellophane mentioned above. And that’s where it’s lived for another whole year.


Hi cake.

Cake wasn’t orange originally. Nor was it covered in green fuzzy dots. Cake has certainly suffered in our hands. (or crisper) But we felt that just throwing it away was a disservice to all its hard work of serving 50 of our friends and 300 of our parent’s closest friends. What to do with Cake? What would be a suitable tribute?

Hopefully the answer is as obvious to you as it was to us. This Cake needs itself a Viking funeral.

Stay tuned in the next few days as we document the cake’s trip from the crisper to Valhalla. It will reside there eternally with the line of its family going back 1000s of years, escorted by valkyries, dining on the finest meats and daily doing battle with other cakes on the fields of Asgard.

This is not a joke. I have the hammered fingers and singed forearm hair to prove it.