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Kim Vidrine loves her group of friends and she loves cakes. So six years or so ago, she created Cake Club as a way to celebrate both.
The full transcript of this episode of KUT News Now is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
This Is My Thing: Cake!
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Michael Lee [00:00:13] I’m Michael Lee and you’re listening to This Is My Thing. On This Is My Thing, we talk to people about the things they do just for themselves. It’s not their job and it’s not a responsibility. It’s just a thing that brings them joy or feeds their soul.
This week: cake!
My guest today is Kim Vadrine. Kim loves cake and she loves her group of friends. So six years ago, she created Cake Club, a way to celebrate both of those things.
Kim Vidrine (at Cake Club) [00:00:40] That’s mine, Ro! Can’t you tell? I did fancy frosting things on there!
Kim Vidrine [00:00:45] My name is Kim Vidrine. Cake Club is one of my many hobbies, but it’s one of my favorite hobbies.
Kim Vidrine (at Cake Club) I am known as kind of the worst froster of all of us. I mean I wear that badge proudly I guess, but occasionally I try to be impressive and so Today, I tried to be impressive with…
Michael Lee [00:01:10] Let’s talk about cake club. This is probably a term that not everyone is familiar with.
Kim Vidrine [00:01:15] We made up the term. Cake Club is a gathering of friends where everyone makes a different cake, maybe from a list, maybe from cookbook, and you follow the recipe precisely. The idea being that if everyone follows the recipe precisely, you don’t ever have to question whether when you make that cake, it will turn out exactly the same. So it’s a way to try every recipe in a cookbook or in a list without personally having to make every single one. And it’s also a great time to talk and catch up. So mine is skillet vegetable cake. Everybody that I’ve told that I was making this for cake clubs said, why would you make a cake with vegetables? That sounds horrible. My family was not excited about this.
Michael Lee [00:02:06] Tell me about the origins. How did Cake Club come to be a thing in your life?
Kim Vidrine [00:02:11] So the six of us are all current and or former marathoners, and we were training together at various times for different marathons. And when you’re a marathon training, you’re running a long, long, long time with each other, and you establish a lot of friendships, and you talk about all sorts of things. And at some point, probably at many points we were discussing food and what we liked and we sort of realized that all of us really had a sweet tooth and we enjoyed baking. And so at some point in 2019, I can’t remember exactly when I saw a list online, just like popped up in my Facebook feed and it said like 30 cakes from the South that deserve to make a comeback. and I… pull the link and I sent it in our group chat that we had for our running. And I said, hey, it would be really fun for us to try to bake every cake on this list. And we could meet and I kind of basically came up with an outline for how Cake Club would work just sort of in that text thread. And it was there are six of us, if we do this five times, we can get through all 30 cakes on the list. and everybody loved the idea. And so Cake Club was born and I believe our first meeting was in June of 2019. So we’ve been together almost six years. Although as a friend group, we had been together longer than that because of running. So we’d all been friends probably about 10 years.
Michael Lee [00:03:48] I love the fact that this is a thing that kind of grew out of a different and very different thing.
Kim Vidrine [00:03:54] We laugh about it all the time that and then and then of course it becomes well I mean the reason you guys have to run is because you eat cake, right? So, um, yes, it definitely you know One part of what brought us together was very health and fitness oriented and the other thing that holds us together is Very much the opposite and we kind of like that too juxtapositions are nice.
Michael Lee [00:04:16] We all contain multitudes.
Kim Vidrine (at Cake Club) [00:04:17] And then you just have a cream cheese frosting with powdered sugar, cream cheese, and butter. So it wasn’t really complicated. I did, as I said, really put on the dog for y’all with my frosting tips. You took a class for that. I did. It’s fine.
Kim Vidrine I am definitely not a perfectionist when it comes to my frosting of the cakes and I have the reputation of being the worst froster in the group and I’m gonna tell you I’ve really leaned into it. I’m fine with it. I have really not tried to get much better at frosting. I did go to some class where they taught me how to put a frosting tip and you know kind of make it look a little prettier and I think I had done that to the cake when you came. I mean, some of the ladies in our group, their cakes are beautiful, but I don’t think that it ever feels competitive. I mean we tease one another good naturedly, but like I said, I am fine with being the worst froster in the group. I am a person who loves, the joke that we say in cake club about me is that if the frosting does not make my teeth hurt, I do not feel like that is an appropriate frosting. I really, really like very sweet frostings. So that’s been something that I’ve learned through Cake Club too is kind of how people who create recipes balance the sweetness of the cake with the sweetness of the frosting and how sometimes a sweeter frosting is, you know, with a not quite a sweet cake and so forth. So those are just some things I’ve learnt, but for me, a sweet, sweet, sweet frosting is always best.
Kim Vidrine (at Cake Club) [00:06:07] I just don’t know how two and a half cups of vegetables is going to taste with only a cup of sugar. There’s only one cup of sugar.
But there’s the frosting the frosting will help the frosting will help. And by the way, you do have multiple
Michael Lee [00:06:13] Well, let’s talk a little bit about your personal relationship with cake. You mentioned that one of the reasons this came to be is that you all talked about things you liked and, and baking was one of them. Is this… has, has baking and cakes in particular, has that always kind of been a part of your life?
Kim Vidrine [00:06:26] Yes it has. In fact my mom was a home ec teacher when people talked about things like home ec and she would bake quite a bit at our house and I had my little easy bake oven when I was a little and I’ve just always loved baking.
Michael Lee [00:06:43] I imagine this is a question that doesn’t have an easy answer, but do you have a favorite cake to either bake or eat?
Kim Vidrine [00:06:49] My favorite cake is a cake called chocolate midnight and it’s a dark dark dark chocolate cake and it is frosted with a very very sweet frosting that to me is the perfect combination. It’s just delectable and everyone in my family loves it because I’ve been making it for years. So my children think that the ultimate delicacy is chocolate midnight cake. They think we need to have it for every occasion.
Kim Vidrine (at Cake Club) I don’t know if y’all was like this, this time or last time, but she doesn’t, I couldn’t use a mixer for any of it.
Michael Lee [00:07:24] When I was at Cake Club a week or so ago, you were all doing recipes out of a particular book.
Kim Vidrine Correct.
Michael Lee Is this sort of part of Cake Club? You have a list or a book that you are working your way through at any given time?
Kim Vidrine [00:07:36] Yes, when we started, we were doing the 30 cakes, which I believe was a list from Southern Living. And then we went to a list from Country Living. And then, we went to our first book, I believe. And then went to second book. And then when we started doing the books, one of the things that was really nice that I’ve enjoyed about the cookbooks is having the voice of the creator of that cake. giving you sort of sidebar comments about this will work best if you do so and so because we didn’t have that with the two lists that we did originally and so we’ve learned reading that preface material in the cookbook is really important because they’ll tell you things about the ingredients that they might ask for.
(at Cake Club) Peaches and cream upside down cake.
(at Cake Club) Did you, what did you use?
(at Cake Club) I used canned peaches. I made a variation on that. No, was it the same? No, so I thought it was better than frozen peaches. So I made that call.
(at Cake Club) You have got to review the rules.
Michael Lee [00:08:42] One of the things I observed in my time at Cake Club was that you do have rules and you do take them relatively seriously. Maybe some more than others.
Kim Vidrine [00:08:51] I would definitely say there’s a range of seriousness with which people approach the rules. Some of us are a little, we follow the recipe a little more closely, we measure things a little bit more diligently. There are some other folks who sort of see it maybe somewhat more interpretively and they allow a little more latitude in how they follow, but. I mean, we’re not gonna be that kind of sticklers in the sense that we’re gonna get hung up on that. It’s mostly just fun to tease people about their deviation from the rules.
Michael Lee [00:09:29] But you don’t get a demerit or anything.
Kim Vidrine [00:09:31] You don’t get a demerit. You still get to participate in the year-end award ceremony, which is not a thing. I’m joking.
Michael Lee [00:09:39] Cake Club, of course, is an exhibition, not a competition.
Speaker 2 [00:09:42] That’s exactly right.
(at Cake Club) …and it was salty and weird. So I went back again. I doubled the recipe so we would have extra because I thought they were going to be good, but they’re not. The other thing is she has you did this…
Michael Lee [00:09:57] What do you think this is doing for your heart and for your soul that you’re not getting without it?
Kim Vidrine [00:10:03] I think that one of the things it does is it allows the two of us whose children are grown to still feel like we have children in our lives and we’re, we’re helping with the idea of, you know, kind of passing on some of what worked in our families. And it, it kind of makes me still feel I’m moming in some respect, not to the adult ladies, but really just pouring into. how they approach challenges with their children and talking about what works. And by no means does what I did always work. But I think that it makes me still feel like I have some work to do as a mom.
(at Cake Club [00:10:48] But even that is weird. You’re usually supposed to put the vinegar in the milk to turn it into buttermilk, but she just had you dump it all in. It’s a really weird.
Michael Lee [00:10:56] A big part of it is loving cakes, but a lot of it also is that it’s a way to connect with your friends on a regular basis.
Kim Vidrine [00:11:02] Absolutely. And we used to all see each other a lot more when we were all running together and all training for the same things. And now we have one lady who’s moved and one of our members had an occurrence of cancer and that pulled her away for a little while. And so it has been for us just a way to really stay connected that has been lovely and very meaningful. You know, We’ve had people since we’ve been together, even as a cake club, who have lost parents. Um, one of the members has had a baby, my child got married. So we’ve kind of been able to combine our love of cakes and our love for one another and one another’s families into this, I think really deeply meaningful. Um, event that, as I said, is less about cake probably, although it is still very much about cake. I mean, I don’t want to be overdramatic, but I mean it has been, um, it’s really been beautiful. Now, we laugh a lot and we are very silly and we definitely don’t take the idea of the cakes too seriously, but it really has been a beautiful way to stay connected, I think. And I’m so, so, happy that we have it and that we make it a point to prioritize our get-togethers.
(at Cake Club) [00:12:25] And then I said this is not right.
Kim Vidrine [00:12:29] I don’t think any of us are really interested in trying to make those beautiful cakes that you know… they have the ones that look like an ice chest full of boiled crawfish or something And I think those are amazing, but I don’ aspire to do that I mean really all I want out of my cakes is for them to taste good and for me to get to enjoy them with people that I love.
(at Cake Club) [00:12:50] Well, what do you think? Would you make it again?
(at Cake Club) I mean, if I needed a vegetable cake.
Michael Lee [00:12:57] Thanks for listening to This Is My Thing. I’m Michael Lee, and I produce the show. Special thanks, of course, to Kim Vidrine for sharing Cake Club with us, and to the other members of Cake Club, Kathy Nicklebur, Rowena Suarez, Yadira McCarter, Rachel Woodall, and Kelly Gin.
We’ve got more This Is My Thing coming soon! We’ve got pieces coming up about a jewelry maker, a meteorite collector, and a sport called the Underwater Torpedo League. Keep listening. If you’d like to tell us about your thing and maybe be a part of a future episode of the show, that’s easy. Just go to the This Is My Thing show page at KUT.org. You’ll find a form on that page you can fill out to tell about your thing. And while you’re in the form-filling-out mood, there’s other forms on KUT as well, including the one you can feel out to become a member of this station. We would love it if you did. Our members make this and everything we do possible.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
