I love cake.

I love it so much that I think a first birthday is wasted on a 1-year-old.

It’s the only time in his life that he gets to mush his mitts into that moist, delicious mass and shove fistfuls of it in his mouth, and he is too young to really appreciate it.

And yet, as much as I love cake, I have to admit that I don’t like cake shows.

You’d think one would follow the other, wouldn’t you?

Well then you obviously haven’t seen a cake show.

Shows about cake are ubiquitous on Food Network right now.

They go by names like “Ace of Cakes” or “Food Network Challenge: Sesame Street Cakes,” and they usually involve professional chefs making cake-like objects at a breakneck pace.

The most surprising thing about cake shows is how little actual cake is involved. Ovens get mere cameos.

The judges of the chefs’ work never taste anything, as near as I can figure. That’s because the work is unabashedly inedible.

Apparently, in all the years I spent eating homemade and supermarket cakes rather than ordering them from confectionary virtuosos, I missed a trend.

These days, when you walk into the foyer of cake emporium and place a special order with the resident pastry master, what you get back is half-baked statuary.

Watch these shows if you don’t believe me.

On “Food Network Challenge,” aspirants are charged with making cakes that look like cityscapes or cartoon characters.

And they do it (sort of) using such mouthwatering materials as Styrofoam, plywood, Rice Krispie bricks and a cake-surfacing compound called fondant, which looks about as appetizing as rubber playground flooring.

The results are not ideally delicious or artistic. It’s like what happens when cookery and sculpture meet in the mediocre middle.

Go online and you will find many people who defend this practice of using non-food items to make food. It’s the only way to ensure that a cake looks its best, they say.

Well, let’s be honest: It’s one of the ways to ensure that a cake-like object looks its best. But if a baker has to stand next to his cake, letting potential eaters know what is made of flour and what is made of fluorocarbon, something has gone awry.

Everybody who makes “cakes” on Food Network, whether they are competing or not, does so in a white-hot panic.

In the cake-making world, apparently, there is never enough time.

What exactly does making a cake quickly have to do with making a good cake?

Anyway, this isn’t so much a complaint about cake shows, ultimately, as it is a complaint about most of the prime-time programming on Food Network these days.

You watch Home & Garden Television to learn about landscaping and painting. You watch Animal Planet to see animals. You watch Lifetime so you can have wistful, pastel-colored, lemon-scented thoughts.

You used to watch Food Network to get hungry.

Now viewers watch this reality game show-packed cable channel for the same reason, presumably, that people watch other reality game shows. To see people sweat, be humiliated, badmouth each other, have nervous breakdowns, be greedy, etc.

Food Network has about as much to do with food these days as The Learning Channel has to do with learning.

Event planners, Food Network programmers and conspicuously un-cakey aesthetes can have their cake-like objects.

As for mere peasants like me, I shall adhere to some wisdom passed along to me by the wife of my French friend Louis: Let me eat cake.

Hitting the road with Shakira

I recently received word from Jeannie Mullins, mother of nascent country music star and Columbia City native Megan Mullins, that her daughter has joined the touring band of Colombian dance-music powerhouse Shakira.

“She has been out with her for about a month, traveling the world,” Jeannie Mullins said. “What a wonderful way to make a living! Megan has had to learn her songs in English and Spanish (she sings backup as well). She’s been to London, Germany, Spain, Colombia, Italy and Paris. She is home for a day or two and then back out.”

Mullins says she doesn’t know what Megan’s wardrobe consists of, but we can be reasonably sure it doesn’t involve jeans and tank tops.

It just goes to show: There is no such thing as genre in popular music anymore.

Local dating show

This week’s Web exclusive is about a new local dating show being put together by videographer Darren Harrison. Read about it at The Journal Gazette’s arts and entertainment blog, Get a Load of This, at www.journalgazette.net/getaload.