The Cake Lady Mystery

UPDATE:  Every so often, I get an email requesting the cake and frosting recipes of The Cake Lady, about whom more below.  Unfortunately, my copies of the recipes that I gleaned by searching the web years ago were lost on a now-defunct computer and I have not found them again.  My apologies to everyone who, like me, would have liked to have had what many consider to be such wonderful cake recipes.

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I needed a recipe for my first cake for cake-decorating class.  Oddly, none of the materials give a recipe for the actual cake, despite lots of recipes for frostings.  Maybe they assume I'm going to use a box mix, but I don't like box mixes most of the time.  Why make a pretty cake if you don't want to eat it?

So I went to the Wilton website, since I'm taking their class, and found official recipes for white, yellow, and butter cakes.  Good.  Then I noticed a discussion forum and checked out their recipe discussion.  Oddly, right there at the top was a notice about a woman named Gladyce, who was also known as "The Cake Lady."  Apparently, she used to email her popular, tried-and-true recipes out but now her family and friends have asked that Wilton and Wilton forum users refrain from "posting, requesting, or sharing her recipes."  Huh.  Weird.  And of course, exceedingly tempting--I mean, who wouldn't want banned recipes that everyone seems to have and love but can't share?  So, of course, I investigated.  There are dozens of posts about "The Cake Lady" on the forum, most of them requesting her recipes.  None of the recipes are there because she wanted to email them to people.

But apparently, then she passed away, back in 2004, I think.  It sounds like she was a pretty nice person.  And I guess, for awhile, her recipes still circulated.  But now everyone is supposed to stop.  And not even talk about these recipes?  Are they planning a book or something?

It gets weirder.  You can search the whole world wide web and find several references to "The Cake Lady," particularly on Canadian baking forums, but also on other websites.  Apparently there are now even other cake ladies, either unaware of Gladyce the cake lady or intentionally using her moniker for their own success.  It is, after all, a rather simple and direct name for someone who bakes cakes.  There are even recipes but most things I've read said those aren't the "real" recipes.  Doesn't it almost sound like an internet hoax, something you'd check on Snopes.com?  Especially because one of her friends, who helps police the rumors, is named "Squirrelly Cakes."

But there are some of Gladyce's original recipes out there (as far as I can tell), just a few (I think I found 5).  All on one site, posted, I guess, by someone unaware of the moratorium on posting and sharing.  Not to get into the hullaballoo, I'm not going to link to that site.  You have Google.  You'll find it.

And if you do have the recipes of Gladyce "The Cake Lady," well, this is blogspot not Wilton, but I want to be respectful, so let's just say my email can be found over there in my welcome.