Recipes
Desserts
Cakes
Crab cakes on brioche buns with asian slaw

Crab cakes on brioche buns with asian slaw

Cakes

Butter will be the death of us, folks. See, people have this idea that baking is an art. That artisan (that’s real artisans, not the word some marketing suits at Panera decided to put in front of every item on the menu) people passed down croissant-making techniques for decades and guarded them with their lives like they were the secret formula to Pepsi or something. I’m not gonna dispute that those people know what they’re doing, because they very clearly do. The chances that one of them can make a palmier better than me are infinitely high; that much is obvious. But at its core, at the very heart of it, super-fancy baking is dumb and simple. It’s a butter and sugar fueled power orgy, more Tim Allen than Martha Stewart. Ever notice how the fancier your pastries get, the more flaky and sugary and layery they get? That’s not art, that’s volume. That’s someone saying “well shit, one of these is good, why not pile 100 of them on at once?” Technique-wise, baking is every bit as dainty and majestic as those guided wine-filled tours in France would have you believe. But conceptually, it’s nothing but brute force and numbers. It doesn’t happen because of a bolt of inspiration, it’s because somebody went into caveman mode and thought I LIKE BOTH OF THESE THINGS I NEED THEM BOTH IN MY MOUTH AT ONCE. MARGE GET THE BUTTER, THIS IS HOW I WANT TO DIE. THIS IS MY VALHALLA. And then, there’s the crab cake. Someone took a food almost exclusively associated with butter and decided to cram it into a patty and add bread crumbs. Nothing says “instant myocardial infarction” like taking something already unhealthy and trying to make it resemble a freaking cake as much as possible. Add the gigantic bun and usual accompaniment of tartar sauce, and you’ve got a sandwich fit for the lobby of a morgue. Did I see all this and turn the other way, make a vegan raw green bean salad thing, and call it a day? Of course not. You know me too well for that. I put a giant crab cake on a giant buttery slab of bread and added other stuff. Sweet, buttery death, I’ll see you at my doorstep.