Most often, you bake a cake for someone you love. You mix all the stuff together and put it in the oven and wait. Sadly, when you open the oven again and look inside, the cake doesn’t look how you feel about that person at all. It’s a disappointment. Still, you can try and fix it with icing sugar and food coloring and marzipan. You are doing the best you can.
Sometimes you don’t bake for someone you love specifically but, for instance, a bake sale or a get-together. A cake can be made to impress or even intimidate your guests. The most unfortunate bakers cook in an outspoken competition like on TV.
You believe the most exquisite cakes must have only been witnessed by a handful of people, because their life span is so short. (Unless you are thinking of some kind of practical German fruit loaf, which lasts for a week, but that’s not the same thing at all.)
A person dedicated to their cake must build a dummy for display and conservation purposes. Another thing you remember as important is that when you serve cake, you pretend as if you don’t care what the person you love thinks of it.
Gina Fischli (b. 1989, Zurich) studied at the Royal Academy of Art, London (2018) and the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (2015). Solo exhibitions include Interior Living, SUNDY, London (2018); Molto Suggestivo, DELF, Vienna (2017); and London Today, Forde, Geneva (2016). Group exhibitions include A house is not a home, Fri Art, Fribourg (2019); ON SITE, Swiss Institute, New York (2019); NEW RUINS, Soft Opening, London (2019); and Way Out, Jenny’s, London (2018). In 2018, she published Bad Timing (Hacienda Books, Zurich). Fischli lives and works in London.