So y'all know my ongoing  love/hate relationship with Oprah, right? Well, I got her 10th Anniversary edition of her O Magazine in the mail today. I took O with me into the tub this evening, as I do all my reading material. Most people know if a book is mine or not. It's easily identifiable by the puffy pages that get wet mid-tubbing action and dry all crinkly, making my books unusually fat. If you care about the state of your books, never lend them to me as I will ruin them. I'm just warning you.

Anyway, I turned to the table of contents and saw that she had an article on cakes. CAKES! You all know how I feel about cakes! Waste of money! Fondant tastes like crap! Who eats gum paste flowers? The same people who ate glue in the 2nd grade, that's who! I heard some lame-ass on some stupid cake baking show say that the cake was the most important thing at a wedding. Um, wrong. That would be the gown, dip-shit. So if you didn't know how I felt about cakes before, you do now.

So why then did I immeidately turn to page 234 to check out the cakes? Am I turning the corner on my emotional cake-bashing status? Have I decided the $6.50 a slice is A-OK? I don't think so, but you never know. I mean cake tastes good. I love eating cake. I just don't want to pay a bazillion dollars for stacked cakes. Take them a part and they are much cheaper. That's what we did.

 So I'm flipping through the first couple of cakes and I'm all, "YAWN! Come on, Oprah." Then I got to page 239 and saw this:

Source

Well, hello lovely. This, my dears, is a Gâteau de Bayou, a version of a traditional spice cake from the Acadian region of Louisiana. This is what leads me to this post - regional cakes. Why not cut a cake that's special to your home town, state or region? I did a little-leg work and came up with a few you might want to contemplate, whether in stacked formation or otherwise.

Source

Pioneer Wedding Stack Cake: This pretty version of a pioneer wedding cake represents South Dakota and its prairie heritage. It is believed that each guest brought a cake layer to a pioneer wedding to stack together. This Pioneer Wedding Stack Cake shown here is based on a simple molasses recipe with applesauce filling. You can get the recipe here. I really like the idea of this. While it might not be the most cordial thing to do to ask your guests to bring a layer of cake to your wedding, it could be a really fun shower or rehearsal idea.

Source

St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake: The Gooey Butter Cake originated in the 1930s. According to legend, a German baker added the wrong proportions of ingredients in the coffee cake batter he was making. It turned into a gooey, pudding-like filling. It's so sweet it'll make your teeth hurt, but it's all crunch and chewy and totally yum. It's generally served as a type of coffee cake. Might be great at a daytime wedding. There are lots of recipes out there for this, but I trust Smitten Kitchen, all the way.

 Source

Lady Baltimore Cake: It's a Southern specialty (despite its northern name!) that has many recipe variations. It's white cake topped with a boiled or "Seven Minute Frosting." What makes the cake special is the combination of chopped nuts and dried or candied fruits in the frosting.

I love the story I found behind this one! I've had this cake a few times and never knew the name or the history (this is one version, there are more, but I like this one the best!):

"Owen Wister (1860-1938), a popular novelist, picked Charleston, South Carolina, as the setting of his new romance novel. He modeled the central character, Lady Baltimore, after one of the city's former belles, Alicia Rhett Mayberry. In the novel, Lady Baltimore created a cake also called "Lady Baltimore."  Wister's description of the cake sent readers of his novel scrambling to find the recipe, which had not been created yet. In his novel, Wister wrote:

"I should like a slice, if you please, of Lady Baltimore," I said with extreme formality. I returned to the table and she brought me the cake, and I had my first felicitous meeting with Lady Baltimore. Oh, my goodness! Did you ever taste it? It's all soft, and it's in layers, and it has nuts - but I can't write any more about it; my mouth waters too much. Delighted surprise caused me once more to speak aloud, and with my mouth full, "But, dear me, this is delicious!"

According to historians, Florence and Nina Ottelengui, who managed Charleston's Lady Baltimore Tea Room for a quarter of a century, developed the cake toward the end of the nineteenth century from a version of the common "Queen Cake" of that period; They are said to have annually baked and shipped a cake to Owen Wister. At Christmastime, they shipped hundreds of white boxes carrying tall, round fragile gift cakes to all parts of the country." Source

Source

Boston Cream Pie: Cooks in New England and Pennsylvania Dutch regions were known for their cakes and pies and apparently, the line between them was very thin. And gooey. And cream-like. This cake was probably called a pie because in the mid-nineteenth century, pie tins were more common than cake pans. The first versions might have been baked in pie tins. Boston Cream Pie is a remake of the early American "Pudding-cake pie." At least that what the cake history dude says here.

Source 

 These are just a few of the bamillion-jillion regional cakes out there: Red Velvet Cake, Coca-Cola Cake, New York Cheesecake, King Cake, Tres Leche Cake, Charlotte Russe, Texas Sheet Cake, Churchill Downs Cake, Appalachian Apple Stack Cake. One site I read suggested hitting up the old thrift stores and looking through old cookbooks. You can find awesome regional recipes there! I have a cookbook of my grandmother's that I'm guessing is from the mid-1940's. On the inside front cover is her hand-written recipe for Divinity. Totally regretting not serving that at our wedding. It would have been divine. Sorry, I just had to.

My point is that you don't have to be married to (Oh, please make me stop. It's late and I'm tired and I get really pun-drunk when I'm tired) an almond/buttercream thing. Because chocolate is so pretty.

All chocolate cake photos are from The Martha, natch.

But you know, you could always just serve pie..............mmmm, pie.