My wife and I celebrated our 33rd wedding anniversary a few days ago. As part of the festivities we did something unusual. We ate some cake.
The cake was wrapped in plastic and foil and had been in our freezer since our 25th anniversary eight years ago.
While I have never had a problem keeping things beyond their “use by” date, I admit that eight years was a little extreme. After six months, most forgotten things in my freezer will have taken on a life of their own and are nearing the point of armed rebellion.
But, the cake was beautiful and after the festivities eight years ago, I called the bakery and asked how to freeze it for future celebrations. I have forgotten the details, but it may have involved an entire roll of aluminum foil and a couple of bats of pink attic insulation.
After chipping away the accumulated layers of frost, we began unwrapping. I felt like an archeologist exhuming an ancient mummy. When the final wrap was gone, we were amazed to see the cake looking fresh and tasty.
I got out the cake server. As I cut through the multi-layer of icing and Lady Baltimore goodness, I recalled scientists digging out a mastodon that had been entombed for several millennia in arctic ice. The meat, they said, was still fresh.
Although our cake was much younger than the mastodon, our Kelvinator freezer was no match for a continent-size glacier. The icing was deliciously sweet. The cake, however, had dried to the consistency of the mummy mentioned above. We shared a taste, wished each other a happy anniversary, and reverently dropped the remainder in the trash.