EAT ME cake
The EAT ME cake is a small cake marked with currants that Alice finds in the hall after shrinking, which causes her to grow to more than nine feet tall, triggering a crisis of identity and a flood of tears that creates the pool of tears.
Discovery and First Effects
After drinking from the DRINK ME bottle and shrinking to ten inches high, Alice finds herself unable to reach the golden key on the glass table. Soon her eye falls on a little glass box lying under the table; she opens it and finds a very small cake, on which the words "EAT ME" are beautifully marked in currants. She reasons that if it makes her grow larger she can reach the key, and if it makes her grow smaller she can creep under the door, so either way she will get into the garden. She eats a little bit and holds her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it is growing, but remains the same size—a result she finds "quite dull and stupid" after so many out-of-the-way things. She then finishes off the cake entirely.
Growth and Its Consequences
The cake takes effect immediately: Alice cries out "Curiouser and curiouser!" as she opens out "like the largest telescope that ever was." Her feet seem almost out of sight, and she plans to send them presents—addressing a letter to "Alice's Right Foot, Esq., Hearthrug, near the Fender." Her head strikes against the roof of the hall; she is now more than nine feet high. She takes up the little golden key and hurries to the garden door, but lying down on one side she can only look through with one eye—getting through is more hopeless than ever. She sits down and begins to cry again, shedding "gallons of tears" until there is a large pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall. This pool later becomes the pool of tears in which she swims and meets the Mouse.
Identity Crisis and the Multiplication Table
While fanning herself with the White Rabbit's fan, Alice wonders if she has been changed in the night and asks herself "Who in the world am I?" She tries to recall her lessons: four times five is twelve, four times six is thirteen, and she cannot get to twenty. She tries geography—"London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome"—and finds it all wrong. She recites "How doth the little crocodile" instead of the expected poem, and concludes she must have been changed for Mabel. She declares that if she is Mabel she will stay down here rather than go back to a poky little house with endless lessons. The cake's effect thus precipitates the story's most explicit crisis of personal identity.
Later References and Thematic Significance
Alice later uses the principle of eating to change size more deliberately. When she encounters the Caterpillar's mushroom, she breaks off a bit of the edge with each hand and nibbles first one side, then the other, to control her height. She also keeps a piece of the mushroom in her pocket and uses it to adjust her size before entering the garden. The EAT ME cake establishes the pattern of ingestion as the primary mechanism for size change in Wonderland, a pattern that continues with the DRINK ME bottle, the Unlabeled magic bottle, and the mushroom. The cake's immediate and dramatic effect—transforming Alice from ten inches to over nine feet—sets the tone for a world where eating and drinking have unpredictable, often inconvenient consequences, and where the body is never stable. The cake also introduces the theme of unintended consequences: Alice's growth prevents her from entering the garden she longed for, and her subsequent tears create the very pool that later traps her. The cake's appearance in the glass box under the table, discovered only after Alice has exhausted other options, marks a turning point in her approach to problem-solving: she begins to experiment with substances that alter her physical state, a strategy she will rely on throughout her adventures.
