We’d tried to get people to come with, you wouldn’t think it’d be so hard to rally a crowd for cake, but who knows with people—and so there were just the two of us, me and India, a little stressed out at the thought of whether we were going to be able to taste-test everything, but ready to rise, like yeast, like a yeasty cake, to the challenge.

Like the cherry on top of a cake of Red Hook hospitality, the shopgirl greeted us by collapsing on the counter with her head in her hands, saying she was having a bad day and just wanted to go home. “But you’re surrounded by cake,” I said. “The cake is the hardest part,” she said, and tried to have us order black coffees to go.

Um.

Anyway.

We looked and we looked, and we admired the blue-dotted Malted Chocolate Cake and the mini tower of Icebox Cake and the Carrot Cake with its promise of orange zest, and then ultimately India proposed we be reasonable, so we settled on the Red Hook Red Hot, which was light and dreamy and just-the-right-amount red velvet chocolatey; and the Lemon Cake, oh, I like lemon desserts, and now I realize I also really like lemon buttercream; and two hot teas, please and thank you.

And then we sat and nattered like girls at teatime, and then, like girls at teatime, we said catty things about the chick in the Dior knee socks.