It's funny to me that when I was a kid I had a heightened sensitivity to overly sweet or tangy foods. Examples are cake icing (though it's possible the repulsion to cake icing was due to me always having cake after an excessive amount of other foods, out of obligation) or tomato sauce. Another (discontinued) food I've been thinking of lately is Popsicle Shots, which I think I might have liked but I remember being unbearably sweet. Now I can just pack away ultrapalatable sludge (homemade, of course) with decadent abandon, but ironically I rarely eat store-bought desserts aside from a pint of generic ice cream of some ordinary flavor or a Toll House ice cream sandwich. Cake never has enough icing for me now, but, also ironically, I almost never eat cake.

On that note, my mom recently made an uncharacteristically delicious chocolate cake - absolutely perfect. I say this is uncharacteristic because my mom is either unaware that there are other cake formulas than 1-2-3-4 or consciously chooses to make every cake a 1-2-3-4. The chocolate cake, to my exact liking, had the typical characteristics of a good cake: light, moist and fluffy. The icing was super light as well - bad icing is stiff with the texture of peanut butter. This was almost like whipped cream, but a little firmer and held shape without melting.

That said, my next basic baking endeavor is what I called "white cake fluffy" in my recipe notepad. The recipe is by Nagi, whose description totally sells it. I expect it to be essentially this chocolate cake, but vanilla, because I prefer vanilla cake to chocolate cake.