According to some people, cheesecake isn’t really cake. I think ice cream cake just ruins the ice cream. I like pound cake but to quote my wife, “Are you @#$# nuts? The whole point of cake is icing!” Then I suggest carrot cake. Then she goes off on $%^# vegetables in a @#$# dessert.
No, it’s not my birthday. I quit having those ages ago. I’ve recently declined slices of birthday cake & birthday giant cookie (even worse) at children’s birthday parties.
My favorite cake (which I recently made myself for my birthday,) is 2-layer peanut butter cake with peanut butter icing.
Yes. Icing is essential to proper cake–particularly wedding and/or birthday cake.
I would also approve chocolate cake with fluffy white icing.
Always make sure, when you frost, that there’s plenty of icing between the layers.
Not a huge fan of cake in general - and I dislike frosting - but my favorite cake is Irish Cream Cake. It has mini chocolate chips in the cake along with the irish cream, and a glaze made from 1 1/2 parts powdered sugar to 1 part irish cream. It’s fabulous.
I’ve also made a Guinness cake which is pretty good as well.
I don’t do cakes. I was a great disappointment to my Mother, who loved to bake cakes. I liked her scones, though - over there you bake them without the raisins and serve them for breakfast as “biscuits” (even though they aren’t cooked twice). The amount of sugar youse americans consume as the first meal of the day boggles the mind for us Yurpians. Your wife says “Icing is the whole point of cakes”? You tell that woman to hand in her “I am an Adult” card, and exchange it for the “I am an opinionated ignorant teenager”. I don’t care what age she is.
I’ve never encountered “Ice Cream Cake”. It sounds like somebody is messin’ with the ice cream. Those ben and jerry boys, they put too much damn bits in it. More sugar. Gods dammit, can’t youse characters eat anything without sweetening it? Puts me in mind of the character in “To Kill a Mockingbird” who put maple syrup on his 'taters.
To repeat: I don’t do cakes. But I’ll make an exception for cheesecake.
I like almost all cakes. German chocolate is a particular favorite.
If it’s YOUR birthday, you ought to get the choice of what cake you want. Even if it’s a cake of soap.
As usual, you are right on all counts Innocent. My wife is fully aware that she has the tastebuds and eating habits of a child.
I agree with your wife. Yum icing.
What is German Chocolate cake Bill ?
German chocolate cake is usually a lighter chocolate, iced with frosting that is chocolate with coconut and usually pecans.
Oh that sounds good!!!
Could become my favourite 
Home-made poppy-seed cake can be very nice too. Rather with crumbles on top than icing but.
German Chocolate Cake:
Ellen, you really need to experience the world. We’re a good start. (She’s not heard of the Ed Sullivan Show and did not know Elvis and Michael Jackson were related by marriage. Sorry if I spilled the beans Ellen but there are few secrets here.)
Good, but fattening. I prefer to halve mine, and eat it too.
Mutepointe!!!
You are not supposed to tell about any of my educational gaps! Or perhaps you are 
???
Anyway, I forgive you because of the beautiful picture of the German Chocolate Cake you sent. Or no! I rather don’t, because posting a tempting picture rather than an actual cake is fairly cruel …
If I’m going to have a couple hundred calories for dessert, I have beer. I will occasionally have a piece of cake to be polite, but that’s as far as it goes.
I almost strictly prefer either white cake with butter cream icing or lemon cake with lemon butter cream icing for birthday cakes.
German chocolate cake originates in Texas, btw. German’s is just the brand of chocolate used in it.
My family is very fond of lemon. When the kids were little, they’d ask for lemon cake for birthday parties, and I always threw away a lot – lemon wasn’t very popular with other kids. I’d start with a lemon cake mix but substitute lemon juice for some of the water in the mix, and I’d also use lemon juice & lemon zest in the icing.
I LOVE chocolate but don’t particularly like chocolate cakes or chocolate ice cream, because the chocolate is too diluted. I’ve had a very rich, flourless chocolate cake that was good. A slab of pure dark chocolate is best, though – forget the cake and go for the pure, uncut stuff! 
Given my druthers, I’d pick pie over cake any day. When I was a child, my older sister made a pie I adored, and she repeated it for my birthday for a number of years. It had a meringue crust, a layer of tart lemon pudding, a layer of fresh peach* slices, and real whipped cream on top. Wow. I think it was called Peach Schaum Torte, or something like that. For the last few years, my daughter has requested her favorite blueberry pie as her birthday cake: graham cracker crust, a thick filling of sweetened cream cheese mixed with whipped cream, and a layer on top of blueberries and a little sugar, cooked with cornstarch to thicken it. The blueberries MUST be wild blueberries, which have much more intense flavor than domestic berries.
I’m a bit of sugar junkie, but I enjoy my sugary treats less sugary than the recipes usually direct. Cake is typically too blandly sweet for me – it needs something to give it some zing.
*The only downside to living in Alaska is that we don’t get good peaches here. I grew up with fresh Washington state peaches, and I miss them. They ship decent nectarines to the grocery stores here, but the only perfect peach I’ve eaten in Alaska was hand-carried on an airplane on my sister’s lap, her wedding present to me.
Growing up my birthday cake was always shaped like a Valentine heart, rarely edible. I think they were all made by some woman named Betty Crocker and they started out yellow but were turned red and pink with the addtion of food coloring, which of course was toxic. The candles weren’t too bad though.
Then I was introduced to my future mother-in-law’s chocolate hazelnut torte. Haven’t had one now for twenty years, it was tough getting so spoiled so young.
Very good, Walden! I did not know that.
Although, I have to say, most European pastries and cakes aren’t as . . . cloyingly sweet . . . as German chocolate cake. Just the smell of a GCC is enough for me.
I enjoy a nice carrot cake with cream-cheese frosting, and also red velvet cake.
For sheer traditional deliciousness with a delectable texture, though, Publix grocery stores’ birthday cake can’t be surpassed. Both white and chocolate are good, and their frosting never tastes bitter or like food colorant. You have a choice of butter cream or . . . whipped cream . . . frosting, too. Mmmmmm!
dwest, I believe it was you who described the most pitiful thanksgiving dinner too. You grew up in what we called “white bread world.” Lots of people like living there because everything is standardized and normal and a person knows what they’re getting. This wasn’t the place that I grew up (We had Eastern European Foods and Slavik Ways) but occasionally we were invited to friends homes for visits. After one such expedition, I made my family our very own Tuna Noodle Casserole. We dissected the recipe, debated the purpose of each ingredient, modified and improved ingredients, and now we do the whole thing stove top. Baking in the oven slows things down and only benefit the potato chips, we which didn’t like. We thought it was a scream that you folks had dessert at every meal too. Why didn’t you just have seconds and eat the dessert watching TV later? I’m so glad you were freed from these chains of bondage. Have you had any good buttermilk lately?