Saint in cake

I had no idea there even was a Saint David until I saw him being not-so-much lauded on CakeWrecks.  It is not that I thought there wasn't a Saint David, why wouldn't there be?  There are two Saint Pelagias from Antioch for crissakes.  But aside from Valentine through Patrick to Nicholas, you just don't see many saint cakes & I kind of got to wondering.  So, after seeing his cake wrecked, I went cruising for David.  It did not take long to find an interesting angle.

It seems in addition to being the patron of Wales (not whales, no matter what other sites might say, altho' in another 25 years he WILL be patron saint of whales because that does seem to be how many of the patronages happen), David is also the patron saint of: Pembrokeshire, a specific bit of Wales-kind of like across the pond, anyone from the US is a yankee, but in the south only someone from north of the Mason Dixon is a yankee, & then in the north, only if you are from the northeast are you a yankee, get to the northeast & yankees are people from New England, then if you actually go to New England they will tell you yankees are people from New York, NOT part of New England, because New York was originally (& I use that term loosely), New Amsterdam.  Finally, it turns out Jans & Kees are kind of a dutch version of Smith & Jones.


Where was I?  Oh, right, Pembrokeshire, a specific county in Wales.  So David is the patron saint of Wales & then in Wales, he is the patron saint of Pembrokeshire.  He is also patron saint of poets, which kind of interested me because there are surprisingly few patron saints of poets.  Well, I was surprised anyhow.  I kind of think of the whole saintly gig with traveling balladeers & troubadours & such.  This poet patronage thing is almost certainly a collision with another saint, specifically King David, who wrote the Psalms & was canonized way-later (& I am sure would be appalled if he knew) is probably who was meant to be David, patron of poets but it all got scrambled & now they both are.

Our David is also listed as patron saint of doves.  Which made me hope against hope that there is somewhere a patron saint of flamingos.  I will keep my eyes peeled.

Finally David is the patron saint of vegetarians.  In fact, he is not alone.  There is even another patron saint of vegetarianism who apparently did not like the smell of roasting meat, but back to David.  I cannot find the reference to how or why he got hooked up with vegetarianism (how hard did I look? not very), but I did discover that his birth was almost certainly the result of a rape.

I have no idea what kind of cake you should have for Saint David's Day.  The BBC website has a lot of recipes for roasted lamb & chicken (odd that), but the only cake was Welsh cake which seems kind of lame, like serving green beer just because it's Saint Patrick's Day.