Posts Tagged ‘Cake’

In the Beginning Was the Recipe…

I was looking for my mother’s recipe for Mincemeat Cake. It was not in the yellow binder where I keep the family recipes copied out by my sister in her meticulous art school handwriting and decorated with whimsical drawings.

The recipe wasn’t in the manila folder where I keep the loose recipe cards and the torn magazine pages and the newspaper clippings and the scribbled instructions on the backs of envelopes, school notebook paper and old invoice forms from my grandfather’s general store. (There’s even a recipe copied out on a soft paper napkin worn to the consistency of Kleenex.)

My mother had a recipe box like all good mid-century housewives and she kept many recipes in that box, but the ones she cherished the most and used the most often were in an old school binder with a coarse cloth cover that was rubbed through to the cardboard beneath. When I inherited the binder in the late 80s, it was falling apart and I transferred the contents over to the aforementioned yellow binder.

A lot of the loose recipes in the folder are starting to fade with age. Some of the oldest date back to the early 50s and the paper has browned and the ink lightened until you almost need to be a forensic documents examiner to piece together the instructions. My mother’s recipes are written out the way she talked and almost seem interactive with their asterisks and inserted comments. “I usually use twice the amount of ginger,” she notes on a recipe for ginger snaps, making me wonder why she didn’t just write out her version of the recipe.

Sometimes she addresses the recipient of the recipe directly as she did with all the family recipes she typed out and sent to me in Los Angeles when I first moved here. (“Will feed six unless they are Tomlinsons,” she wrote on her recipe for macaroni and cheese, which was the best I’ve ever had.)

Reading some of the recipes is like traveling in a culinary time machine—all those references to “oleo” and directions to melt chocolate in a double boiler, instructions rendered obsolete by the invention of the microwave. The recipes also show a high degree of brand loyalty. It was always “Pet” Evaporated Milk and the 10X brand of confectioner’s sugar. (In fact, that’s what it’s called in all my mother’s recipes—10X sugar.)

When I finally found the recipe—stuck between the pages of Jane and Michael Stern’s Square Meals, I realized two things right away. It was the recipe I remembered my mother making but it was not her recipe. The instructions were written out in a hand unfamiliar to me. It’s fussy writing, with little circles dotting the Is.

My mother had two kinds of handwriting—the elegant, grown-up penmanship she used to sign her canvases and our report cards and the messy scrawl she used to communicate with herself in grocery lists and refrigerator reminders and notes. She doodled on her notes, a habit my sister inherited.

I’ll never know the name of the woman who passed this recipe on to my mother, but she would have been a friend. Because sharing the food you love is one of the things friends do.

Somebody’s Mincemeat Cake Recipe

2 cups (1 jar) prepared mincemeat

2 cups chopped walnuts

1 tsp. vanilla extract

¼ cup rum or cognac

1 tbsp. grated orange rind

¼ cup orange juice

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup mayonnaise

3 cups flour

1 ½ cups flour

¾ tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

In a large bowl, mix the mincemeat, walnuts, vanilla, rum (or cognac), orange rind, orange juice, buttermilk and mayonnaise.

Combine dry ingredients and sift into the wet mixture. Blend thoroughly.

Pour into a greased and floured tube pan (or use one that’s been sprayed with Pam) and bake at 325 degrees for two hours.

Remove from oven and cool on a rack.

Frost with buttercream icing using a cookie press.

Buttercream Icing

¼ cup butter, unsalted

1 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar

1 tbsp. milk

Beat ingredients together. The mixture will be very stiff.
Put into a cookie press and press frosting designs on top of cake.

Garnish with candied fruit.

I celebrated my 21^st birthday with two cakes. One was devil’s food with German Chocolate icing that my mother made and sent to me by way of my younger brother. The other was a pound cake with pink, lemon-flavored fondant icing, an old-fashioned confection baked by my great-aunt Helen who lived in the small North Carolina town where I was going to college.

One birthday, two cakes—that’s just about the right ratio. When I moved to Los Angeles the next year, I ate my birthday meal in a now-defunct coffee shop called The Copper Penny. I ordered a slice of carrot cake. It was good. I ordered another slice to take home to the tiny studio apartment I rented in the middle of L.A.’s Korea Town. I’d been in the city for six weeks. There was no one in Los Angeles who loved me enough to make me a cake.

I felt pretty sorry for myself until I discovered that most of my new friends had never actually tasted home-made cake. Never. They were familiar with bakery cakes that come with thick, lard-laden frosting that coats your tongue with a sweet slime. Some had made cakes themselves from mixes and been happy with the results. (And really, the chocolate cake mixes on the market are great. If you weren’t raised on home-made cake.) The idea of someone actually … baking … a cake for them was an exotic concept.

Poor deprived children. As Benjamin Franklin once said about beer, “cake is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

I baked a cake for my best friend’s 25^th birthday. It was chocolate with a chocolate mousse and raspberry filling and chocolate fudge frosting. Her response was the kind of rapturous appreciation master chefs dream of.

I make her birthday cake every year now. Because I love her and because making a cake is a way of saying, “I love you.” When my brother and sister and I were little, our mother used to make these incredibly elaborate cakes for us. There was a rocking horse for my brother one summer; a butterfly for my sister; a train for me. At Easter there would be coconut cake with the coconut dyed green with food coloring and little jelly bean “eggs” hidden in the “grass.” She invented a cake filled with walnuts and sour cherries to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. (It was served warm with cherry syrup poured over it. But it was also good cold, sans syrup.)

As we grew up, I started baking more and more. Bread and sweet rolls, brownies and cookies. And cake.

I once made my sister a Buche de Noell for her birthday because that’s what she wanted. No one in France makes their own; and there’s a reason why. By the time you make the cake and the filling and the syrup to brush the cake layers and the frosting—you’ve used up every pan in your kitchen and had to borrow some from your neighbors. I have to say, though, it was pretty tasty. And she was pleased that someone had gone to all that effort to please her. Which made me happy.

There’s an old expression, “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.” I grew up in a house where that could have been embroidered on a sampler. Food isn’t love, but making food for the people you love is an act of love. And there’s no sweeter way to say you care about someone than making them a cake.