We need all the comfort we can get these days. That’s why, despite the subtropical conditions we have endured for much of this summer, I’m still baking. Nothing beats the peace I feel when I’m kneading a batch of bread dough and most of me (and half the kitchen) is covered in flour.
I’m just a clumsy but passionate home cook, but I do have one recipe that people beg for, and that’s my mom’s milk chocolate cake. It’s an amazing cake, tall and proud, silky smooth and feathery light. I’m greeted with moans of joy whenever I show up with it.
When I asked my mother where she got the recipe, she said airily: “Oh, from a cousin on my father’s side.” However, later she mentioned that it was Tissie’s favorite cake, and her eyes filled with tears. Tissie, whose real name was Gladys, was her beloved older sister who passed away before I was born. Making this cake is my way of keeping my mom’s memory alive, and feeling connected to the aunt I never knew.
The cake is often requested for birthdays, and has sported a lot of different decorative themes (pirate, zoo, ponies) over the years. One notable version, made for my daughter-in-law’s 23rd, featured a large cartoon bat. Laura and my son Hunt had woken up during a visit to our summer cottage with a bat whipping around their bedroom ceiling. This was my attempt to inject a little humor into what was an unhappy few weeks for them. The cake definitely cheered them up during their rabies vaccination ordeal.
My cake works equally well for graduations, such as the Survivor-themed creation we made for my son’s college graduation. My husband did the decorating and created an amazing Survivor logo surrounded by the words “Outwit, Outdrink, Outspend.” It was a little hard to tell, but the bleary-eyed graduate and his friends seemed to appreciate it.
A super-sized version also decorated by my husband took home top honors in a cake contest celebrating our town’s bicentennial a few years ago. David copied the “Entering W. Newbury” road sign, and it was a dead ringer for the real thing. We won Best Overall Cake, and the panel of judges confided to us that we would have won in all the categories but that would have been discouraging to the other contestants. We got a nice certificate, a blue ribbon and an apron. We also ate cake for weeks afterwards, but sometimes you have to suffer for your art.
But in the interest of full disclosure I have to reveal a dark moment — the time I SOLD my mother’s cake recipe. It was a episode of madness during the early days of Ebay, when it seemed possible to buy and sell anything. Why not a recipe? I called it Miracle Milk Chocolate Cake and I got $10. The shame still rankles. How could I? What was I thinking? Why did I only charge $10? These questions remain unanswerable, but I never did it again.
I’m still not ready to share the recipe, still shaken by the Ebay incident. But that’s okay, because this is MY recipe, the one that connects me to my family and friends, past and present. Many of you have your own touchstone recipe, passed down from your grandmother, cut from a magazine, or created by your own hands.
So, whatever that special recipe is — whether it’s a to-die-for mac and cheese, a truly awesome pot roast, or the best Jell-O salad the world has ever known — it’s time to hit the kitchen and make it. Nothing counters stress and uncertainty like cooking, especially when it’s a batch of your mother-in-law’s famous Snickerdoodles, made with love and shared with whoever it’s possible to share them with at the moment.
Forget the quarantine 15. We’re all (getting chubby) in this together.
Marilyn Archibald (archie4618@aol.com and blogging at malibu93.webnode.com) lives in West Newbury and believes that cake is its own food group.
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August 09, 2020 at 12:35PM
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Conquering uncertainty with cake, and love - Lowell Sun
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