This cake was made for the birthday of a young bride whose new last name is Elephant (Oliphant? Eliphant? Whatever.) It’s always fun to anthropomorphize cute little sugar animals and I didn’t get a chance to make elephants for the Noah’s Ark cake, so this satisfied that need. Otherwise, there isn’t that much to say about the cake so let’s just talk about elephants!

Elephants are extraordinary. As it happens, I’ve read several books about them recently and have learned some fascinating things. In this factual account, a young man relocates to 1920s colonial Burma and takes on a job handling elephants in the jungle. Their sense of smell extends for miles, their loyalty is hard-won but lasting, and they will go to great lengths to protect each other and the people they respect. When WWII reaches their corner of the world, they build bridges for the British army and embark on a harrowing rescue mission that leads them, with Japanese forces closing in on them, to climb a makeshift narrow staircase built into a rock face.

An entirely different treatment of elephant life can be found in The White Bone, a novel by Barbara Gowdy. In it, she imagines the inner lives of a group of African elephants. Obviously fanciful, the book does feature many well-known elephant habits. Did you know that elephants grieve for their dead and perform mourning rituals, staying with the body for several days, covering it in leaves and branches? They can also track each other over very large distances and recognize one another even after a separation of many years. They use mud as sunscreen and consume up to 600 pounds of food per day.

And lastly, while it has been a number of years since I enjoyed this particular book, no discussion of elephant literature would be complete without reference to this classic.

Now if only someone would order a rabbit cake, I could indulge myself and reread Watership Down.