But for the artist Wayne Thiebaud, whose paintings luxuriate in the commonplace — be it his signature bakeshop-window cakes and Boston cream pies or a roast chicken twirling on a rotisserie — the Sacramento Delta is fertile ground.
There was Anne of Cleves tea shop, its window bulging with cakes that oozed fillings and icing, and Cranch's Original Sweetshop ("Est 1869"), twinkling with sherbet lemons, pear drops and chocolate eggs.
Now a hopelessly enticing window display of cakes, tarts, quiches, and the shop's Belgian specialty, speculoos, distracts even the most abstemious passersby — including Bill de Blasio, who has lately been truant from his normal early-morning visit for an espresso and a cookie.
In the window are the cakes made with the Scotts' flour: coffee and walnut; ginger and treacle; chocolate devils; and Wales's contribution to the baker's art, bara brith - I ate a great, thick slice of it, all deep, russety brown, generously studded with fruit and scented with spice.
Decorative ornaments lie in piles in the windows, amid marzipan cakes and glistening leather boots.
Frost cakes the windows of Stephen Brimson Lewis's streamlined set, but inside the household, the temperature is rising, as you might expect from a domestic reckoning that was considered mighty shocking in its day and still raises eyebrows more than a century on.
But it lacks the show window filled with special-occasion cakes that stopped shoppers on Madison Avenue.
He asked Francisco, "Could the baker put a sign in the window — 'We do not bake cakes for gay weddings?' . . .
On a perfect cloudless morning, the candidate stepped into a cafe and bakery in Dover, N.H., past an assortment of wedding cakes in the window, white as his teeth.
Her artistic flair could be put to use designing festive window displays and decorating wedding cakes, and she could hire and train the younger girls who worked behind the counter.
On Thursday the court banned baker Yannick Tavolaro from displaying the cakes in the window of his Grasse Delights bakery, in a ruling which does not affect his right to produce or sell the cakes.
