Funeral cake

In the Netherlands there is a cake everybody is familiar with. It has a yellow colour and it seems that everybody who is a bit of a cook, can bake it.

So you get it in quite a lot of variations. See it a lot in offices when somebody is celebrating a birthday. When you are a bit tight with money you don't order something nice from a baker, instead you or your wife bakes a cake or you buy a cheap cake from a supermarket.

The best of these cakes was made by my father. He would add a bit of lemon sauce to the dough which made it quite nice and moist. Very unlike what you get from the shops, it's often called “hotel cake” and tastes a bit like cardboard if you are lucky and is very dry. Next to office birthday celebrations it also pops up regularly at funerals, reason why we nicknamed it “funeral cake”. You attend the regular funeral and afterwards you are invited to come back to the funeral parlour for a bit of togetherness with relatives and close friends. You will get coffee and that cake and it's hard to say “No” to an invitation.

I left the Netherlands years ago, funerals in the UK often end in the pub where you will have snacks and something to drink. The drink is something you most of the time will pay for yourself, so it can be something else than weak brown drab fluid.

The last funeral I attended in the Netherlands was of a former colleague. I hadn't seen him for years, but we got along quite well while he still worked, which was some years before.

After the actual burial a couple of other former colleagues and me were contemplating about the guy in the parlour. We all had our memories about the man, who really had been a very nice guy. Coffee in one hand, piece of cake in the other. I told a funny thing. Suddenly tears sprang in my eyes and I waved at the others, I could not continue. I must have looked quite alarming and sad, tears in my eyes and all.

“Oh my! I never knew you were so close to him!”, one colleague exclaimed.

I took a gulp of coffee and swallowed hard: “Sorry, I have some problems with the cake. Almost suffocating...” I had problems even saying this. One of the others slammed on my back and I felt the cake slowly sinking.

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