Having My (Coconut) Cake and Eating it Too

I've always hated the saying "having your cake and eating it too."  Because what are you supposed to do with cake if not eat it?  Let it sit around and attract vermin?  Nevertheless, when it came time to blog about two recent reads, one of which happened to have "cake" in the title, my love of puns outweighed my distaste for this phrase.  And so that's how you came to be reading Having My Coconut Cake and Eating it Too, a microsummary of Amy E. Reichert's The Coincidence of Coconut Cake and Jenn McKinlay's Death of a Mad Hatter.  The first is about a delicious confection; the other is about hats that look like delicious confections -- or at least about hats that can be worn while eating said confections and trying not to get murdered.  

The Coincidence of Coconut Cake serves up a Milwaukee meet-cute between a struggling restauranteur and a cranky food critic.  After nearly colliding over a decadent coconut cake, the two embark upon an unlikely friendship, neither aware of the other's identity or the impact it has on their lives.  In Death of a Mad Hatter, London millinery mavens craft crowns for an Alice in Wonderland-themed tea party gone horribly wrong.  Lives are at stake there too -- literally.  Will the critic ever get a chance to show the restauranteur that he's as layered as that cake?  Will the mavens escape the melee with their hats and lives intact?  Although I already sensed the answers (I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I do read a lot of fiction), what I most enjoyed were the journeys on the way to finding out for sure.  Because sometimes  -- okay, most of the time -- what I crave from reading is comfort.

And few things are more comfortable than cake.  

So to whoever first said that you can't have your cake and it eat it too, I say this: 

Shut your pie hole and swallow already.