V-Day 2025
In my essay, L-O-V-E Themes — Modern Dating Lingo, posted in The Art of Letter, and dated Year’s End 2019, I mention this celebratory culinary activity:
“And bake a Dump Cake to celebrate your freedom from a fruitcake!”
Love being what it is, and not being what it ought to be, I decided to reveal, on my website, the not-so-secret ingredients of The Dump Cake for this Valentine’s Day.
V-Day has really been put through the romantic wringer, especially of late. And I do know quite a bit about the workings of the wringer-washer from my girlhood household. While my grammar school friends had the truly modern convenience of a spanking brand-new, front-load washer, I got an early start on my historical novel research whilst in the parental home!
In early February, I went online to try to find a Valentine’s Day Card for Husband.
It’s always a comical commentary on the sordid state of love, and love affairs, whenever I go in search of a manufactured billet-doux for The Man I Married — as opposed to the paper form of emotional blackmail — For The Man I Love.
The prices of these corporate politically-correct concoctions are through the recessionary roof! The verbiage may have been AI-generated. I promptly informed Dear Hubby that his Valentine’s Day Gift from me this year was going to be The Dump Cake.
Not that I am dumping my beloved webmaster and spouse for anyone else. He’s seen me through thick and thin on this website, and offline. He’s more than a keeper.
This recipe comes courtesy of yet another defunct once-published IRL magazine: Country Living, May 2001. The title of the printed presentation of several recipes is:
HAVING YOUR CAKE.
This term comes from an idiom that is truly idiotic: He wants to have his cake and eat it too.
My perfectly logical response has always been: Why else would one have a cake, other than to eat it??
Evidently, there are cakes that are baked, just for looking at!
I do enjoy the sight of a lovely cake, with fancy icing and pristine presentation. But if you cannot eat it, why bake it?
The Dump Cake this year has special meaning for me, here, in the United States of America. There’s so much DOGE-gone dumping of wasteful, corrupt, fraudulent and illegal taxpayer-paid spending going on! I can’t keep up with it!
After a lifetime of waiting for this reality of reckoning to happen, I’m stunned to see it actually happen, and at warp-speed. Just goes to show there are the DOERS and there are the TALKERS in life, and in politics, although the governmental liars (talkers) weren’t even peddling credible b.s. Only fools and deluded navel-gazers believed the focus-grouped crock from those elected crooks.
The DOGE-gone truth is that the parasites on the body politic were so sub-par, inferior, unsustainable, unmarketable and lazy, they had to be taxpayer-subsidized. Yes, We the People have been paying for our own ripoff acts for decades!
Note bene: The pronunciation of any word or acronym is essential to proper use of the word. I’m going with the Italian doe-guh, with a soft g, as in Doge of Venice.
The reportage of yet another money-laundering publicly funded spigot being turned off — for BILLIONS of DOLLARS — in an agency created by an Executive Order by President John F. Kennedy in 1961:
The Real News sounds unreal, and, yet, in a very real, and woeful, sense, it is unreal.
“How Long Has This Been Going On?” is the theme song of patriotic Americans today, yesterday, and, yup, tomorrow.
I much prefer the song composed by George Gershwin, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, for Funny Face, the 1927 Broadway stage musical — to the 1974 “How Long” (Has This Been Going On?) by the English band, Ace.
This latter musical whining about reality meeting up with unreality was interpreted by original listeners as the victim-cry of a cuckolded hubby (or in pure 1970s cultural morass, a live-in Lothario). The lyrics, however, express outrage —- monotonously muted in the way that only “soft rock” bands of that era could intone — over the moonlighting of the bassist with at least two other rock bands.
Fidelity from the Instrumentalist to the Lead Rock Star was so hard to come by!
The Dump Cake is indeed appropriate for the kind of moonlighting that used to haunt the days and nights of a former supervisor of mine at the Sacramento District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. My essay, The Memorandum (St. Patrick’s Day 2013), details that delightful phase of my young life!
It’s so nice to know that, one day, we tay-paying Americans will reminisce about the 100 days that ended our own financing of anti-American propaganda and the creepy-crawly corrupt funding of our own domestic Regime Change — till the cash-cows came home, or croaked.
I presently reminisce, on Valentine’s Day, about my Gabrielle, the Snowshoe cat. She was an adorably sweet and fatally feminine creature. Her kill-style was unique to her. It truly did amaze me. She’d half-terminate a lizard, and then keep the thing by her, usually on a rock wall, in the blazing summer sunlight. Every once in a while, she’d thwack little Mr. Gekko it with her little Q-tip paw, keeping those soft delicate pink nails perfectly clean.
After a certain point, I couldn’t look at this long, drawn-out killer instinct on protracted display. Gabrielle most definitely did not go for the jugular (like my black cat, Annabelle, did!).
Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. There’a a truism that any true patriot understands!
I’m celebrating the truth and patriotism, and liberty, just as much as love, on this Valentine’s Day, or V-Day. For without truth, and without patriotism, and, most definitely, without liberty there’s not much love to exalt, revere, or even feel.
The Dump Cake can be created quickly, easily, efficiently, and cheaply, with a cost/ratio analysis that’s unbeatable (unless you fudge the numbers). The final product is a delicious dessert that’s worth every cent that goes into it.
The Dump Cake is a winner, in the pragmatic, decisive, first-rate, efficacious and victorious American way!
Ingredients
2 cups flour
1-1/2 cups milk
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa
3/4 cup butter
3 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
Grease two 8-inch pans, dust with flour. I use a heart-shaped baking dish.
Combine the ingredients in the order given, mixing with a hand-mixer. After all the ingredients are blended, mix on medium-speed for 3 minutes.
Pour batter in the pan. Bake at 350 degrees F. for 45 minutes or till the top springs back when touched.
Let cool before serving. Vanilla ice cream on top of a slice of Dump Cake is the five-star (out of five) way of having your cake and eating it too!