The Epitome of Cakedom

The public library was a weekly haunt for me growing up. My mom and I would part ways at the door, she heading for the fiction section and me to the children’s room.

During one trip in my pre-teen years, I found the “Beany Malone” series by Lenora Mattingly Weber, and found another family to belong to—mine was actually quite wonderful, but these characters somehow connected with another part of me in the ways good characters do. I wanted to live next door to the Malones—and at the same time, I did. I spent so much of my free time at their home in Denver I could tell you just how old Beany was when she finally got her room painted “a shade halfway between robin’s egg blue and the sky in August.” Though they lived thirty years in the past, for me they were contemporaries. They lived knowing they were a family. I loved that about them. And when I emerged from my room to join my own family, the air of their camaraderie followed me down the stairs, and helped me see and name the good things my family brought to me.

Most of all, I loved their family meals. I loved watching how Beany, still a teenager, planned out the meals, using her ingenuity and thrift to keep the Malone table filled with good food, prettily presented.

But when it came time for extravagance and celebration, her older brother Johnny Malone was the one I wanted to see in the kitchen. I grew up believing his Lady Eleanor Cake was the epitome of cake-dom, with its fifteen egg whites and “feather light, velvety texture.” When the Lady Eleanor Cake was in the oven at the Malone house, it was my best indication the event was special. This extravagant cake—fifteen egg whites in wartime!—conferred value on people and events, and reminded me that the best creations are the ones we share with others.

I wondered about the cake, possibly obsessed about it. I wondered enough to purchase the Beany Malone Cookbook not once, but twice—each time amazed it didn’t include this essential Malone family recipe. I’m not sure why now, in adulthood, I decided to stop wondering and get busy in the kitchen, but I did, determined to create my own recipe for the Lady Eleanor Cake. Virtual meals, in fictitious places, can only sustain you so much. And it was time to move from Denver, in the 1940s, into the new century.

7024892047_89e44031cb_oSomething with fifteen egg whites most likely would be in the angel cake category, so I started there. But “velvety” is not how I would describe the spongy texture of angel cake. It needed a bit more depth. It needed more vanilla, a just a bit of the richness of egg yolk, along with the egg whites. I went through five variations, with my family gamely trying every version.  We had an ever-changing mixture based on angel cakes, chiffon cakes, and a lemon cake, striving to get something worthy of the hours of daydreaming I’ve done about this cake over my lifetime. But it eluded me. Egg whites became a staple on my grocery list. By the end, my daughter knew when she heard the mixer going for ten minutes or so, she would be called upon about an hour later to judge if this version was both “feather light” and a “velvety texture.”  It had to be both!

I considered it a significant moment when, on my birthday, I finally got the right proportion of ingredients. And a fictitious family from the 1940s, who had invited me to their home on a quiet street in Denver, Colorado, reached through the pages and joined my family in New York, helping us celebrate in style.

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Andrea%2BDoering%2BPhotoAndrea Doering is an editor, freelance writer, author of three books for children, and most recently The Children’s Table: Recipes and Meals Inspired by Favorite Children’s Stories. She lives in New York, just one block away from the children’s library.

Mixing bowl photo by Barb Hoyer, on Creative Commons

Birthday Cake: Abroad

I plan trips carefully, choosing my companions with as much thought as I can. Still, despite my best efforts, things sometimes go awry.

This was how I found myself in Europe over my birthday, right in the middle of a two week trip which was meant to be an adventure. Communication hadn’t functioned, and I opened my eyes each morning to greet my worst nightmare: lonely in a foreign country. Isolated in someone else’s house. Out of place in someone else’s life.

I was staying in the heart of the small country of Luxembourg, which is situated between Germany, Belgium, and France. The entire country is smaller than the state of Rhode Island.

On my birthday, my hostess decided that I should have a birthday cake. For a moment, my spirits rose. She asked me what kind I would like and I answered honestly. “Chocolate, with coconut icing.”

She searched through her cookbooks until she found a recipe she thought would do. Then she got out the ingredients and turned the book over to me, sitting at a barstool to watch.

My experiences with baking have been rather fraught. Once, I replaced baking powder with baking soda in a batch of biscuits, ending up with hard, pungent rocks. On another occasion, I attempted to make peanut butter cookies for a beau’s father. When my mother saw them, she buried them in the kitchen trash can, covering them with other trash to hide them from view.

Cara, bakingMy hands shook as I began to follow the recipe. I didn’t talk much, I knew my voice would shake, too.

I had never used a kitchen scale, and it took me a moment to figure it out, reading the recipe and matching it to the new units of measurement.

But, like my childhood hero Amelia Bedelia, I took a little of this and a pinch of that and made cake batter.

We made several small cakes instead of one large one, and while they baked, I stirred up the frosting, following another recipe. It was a little stiff and a little sweet for me, but by then I was spent. I frosted half of the small cakes and allowed them to sit on the counter.

When I tasted one that night, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that it was dry. No amount of water seemed to help.

In spite of my disappointment about the way the trip had gone, I was keenlybirthday cake: abroad aware that I might not be in Europe again for a long time, if ever. It was heartbreaking to feel that the trip was a waste. I promised myself that I was not a waste of a trip.

We traveled to Orval, to learn how the Trappist beer was made and to sip hot chocolate in the chill of the early afternoon. We darted through rain in France, consuming pastries and coffee, the only one I was confident pronouncing: cafe au lait. I endured the stomach aches I got after these cups of coffee, my stomach rebelling at all the dairy.

I inspected leggings at a shop in Germany, only to be hard-sold by a salesgirl who searched a long time for the right English word: those will make your ass look hot, she said.

mint teaOne sunny day, we took the train to the Netherlands to meet a friend who lived in Amsterdam. We spent the day walking around Maastricht, and I reveled in the overheard English words, and the tea I had learned to order, made with fresh mint in a clear glass.

My friend was at ease in the city, in the country, and I couldn’t help but be at ease with her as she smoked a sultry cigarette every hour or so, like clockwork.

I have never experienced friendlier sunshine than I did in Maastricht that day.

For the rest of the trip, I ate birthday cake for breakfast.

I rose earlier than the other occupants of the house, partly because of jet-lag, and I presume, because of anxiety.

I ate the cake until the small round mounds became too hard and my hostess threw them away.

Apples and Honey

I have never been much of a gardener, nor someone who relishes yard work and the natural rhythms of planting and harvesting. This is probably because in the first decade of my adult life I moved five times—in four different countries. Occasionally my apartments might have hosted a few pathetic geraniums, but both physically and metaphorically, those years were not ones in which I was “putting down roots.” I was a traveler and a missionary, perpetually single, and free of family demands.

Free too, of the connection, rootedness and sanity that comes with being cared for within a family day in and day out.

One particularly lonely September I was teaching in Lithuania, feeling as forlorn and shriveled as the last brown leaves clinging to northern European trees I didn’t even know the names of, when a friend brought me a bag of apples from her family’s trees. She also brought me a jar of dark-colored honey, a small portion of a gift she’d received, more than she could eat on her own.

Putzing around my kitchen that weekend, I decided to see what I could cook with apples and honey. Finding a recipe for apple-honey cake on a webpage devoted to Jewish cooking, I discovered that apples and honey are traditionally eaten during the Jewish New Year. Together, they are meant to symbolize the hope of sweetness in the coming year. My friend had unknowingly brought me apples and honey mere days before the September High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Psalm 81 is a traditional Psalm of Rosh Hashanah, during which the shofar trumpets are blown and God reminds them: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.” Of all the things I expected from that coming year, I could not, in the particularly grey autumn of single almost-30, have believed that an apple-honey cake held any hope for sweetness ahead. Hope was running very thin, and after many years of missionary sacrifice and relational disappointments, I suspected that when God commanded that I open wide my mouth, I would be getting bland, dutiful manna, not honey.

Nevertheless, the end of Psalm 81 promises:“He would feed you with the finest of wheat, And with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.” Where a Protestant might just see ingredients, a Jew sees promises, so I baked my cake, invited friends over to share it, and tried to muster some belief that what lay ahead would be sweet.

But it wasn’t.

The grey, both within and without, got a lot greyer, and that northern European winter was colder than it had been in decades. I learned how to wear loneliness like a tattered coat. I moved back to the States before the next school year and took the least-missional job I could find. It was a difficult, wrenching, decidedly non-sweet year.

And so was the next. The year after that, thanks to counseling, sunshine and exercise, was a little bit better.

The year after that I got married. I moved into my husband’s house in Colorado and discovered that amongst the twenty trees on our lot—mostly locust, maple and aspen—there are two apple trees. They take some serious effort to maintain. They have to be pruned and shaped, watched for fire-blight. When overripe apples fall on the lawn, they rot and kill the grass. In September we spend several weekends on ladders, shoveling the bounty of apples into box after box, giving them away to friends, coworkers, neighbors, and whoever will take some of the abundance off our hands.

Each year, I’ve made the apple-honey cake again, in an old yellow Bundt pan. I grease the pan liberally so the sticky batter of apples, spices, honey and brewed coffee will come out clean and brown. Last weekend, I pulled one of the gallon-sized Ziplocs of sliced apples from my freezer and made the cake to take to friends who just had their second baby. As we ate it together, our son and their daughter chased each other around the kitchen.

I don’t quite know when I first felt these new roots taking hold. My personal story could have just as easily continued to be one of perpetual motion, but somehow instead, I’m living in the suburbs, learning how to care for fruit trees. Instead of feeling like a single, severed branch, I live in a rhythm of seasons. There is honey and sweetness. But I know it is, as the Psalm says, honey from a rock, sweetness that has been wrung from hardness. And sweeter for it.

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J Fueston Photo 2“Apples and Honey” was written by Jennifer Stewart Fueston. Jennifer writes in Longmont, Colorado where she lives with her husband and young son. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania. She recently published a chapbook of poetry, Visitations, with Finishing Line Press. She blogs very sporadically at jenniferstewartfueston.com and has just realized she uses Twitter (@jenniferfueston) primarily during playoff football.

Enough

I was a recent divorcee, and we were traveling to meet the family of the man with whom I was “the other woman.” Everyone had been gracious from afar, but I knew that his mom had been on the other side of infidelity and I worried that grace might be a little frosty in person. Perhaps there was forgiveness for the son, but not for the home wrecker girlfriend.

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, I kept pestering Rich, asking what we could take to dinner. I was nervous about making a good impression. I knew that his mom was accomplished in the kitchen, while I was coming from a season of limited cooking. In my first marriage, I had all but given up preparing home-cooked meals, relying instead on prepackaged food to feed my family. With Rich’s encouragement, I was beginning to stretch my culinary wings a bit, but preparing anything for his mom, my eventual mother-in-law, felt like a test that I was destined to fail.

00781 (1)We finally decided that we would take bread and salad. We made two loaves of bread, made some compound butters, and bought the ingredients for a Caprese salad with a balsamic reduction. I knew it wasn’t enough. In light of a turkey and mashed potatoes and homemade cheesecake, what were a couple loaves of bread and some mozzarella, tomato, and basil leaves? It wouldn’t be enough.

I wouldn’t be enough.

The truth was, I wanted to take something that might cover my inadequacies as a cook, but also as a potential wife, as a mother. Something to prove that I was more than an adulteress. It was my first major holiday apart from my children, the first Thanksgiving in years that I wasn’t spending with my parents, and I longed to be accepted as a part of this family—to have a place in this home during a season when I felt displaced in so many areas.

As mealtime approached, my nerves increased. Rich’s brother and sister-in-law had welcomed me to their brand-new home warmly, even if the heater wasn’t working properly. But I was still waiting to meet the woman who had given birth to the man whose hand I was currently clutching. Our meager offerings to the Thanksgiving feast looked as small as I felt.

We heard the Jeep pull up the driveway and I could feel my heartbeat quicken. We should take the bread and go. Go before she had a chance to look at me and disapprove.

She came through the door, and her sons went to give her a hug. I stayed back to give them an opportunity to say hello, then she made her way over to me.

And she embraced me.

The rest of the day, we sat in the kitchen, cutting up potatoes together, tasting the balsamic reduction that Rich made, laughing, telling stories. I had a piece of her cheesecake, she had a piece of our bread.

Everything was delicious. Everything was enough.

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424033_10151308414006236_662319879_n (1)“Enough” was written by Alise Chaffins. Alise is a wife, a mother, an eater of soup, and a lover of Oxford commas. You can generally find her sitting behind a keyboard of some kind: playing or teaching the piano, writing at her laptop, or texting her friends a random movie quote. She lives in West Virginia and blogs at knittingsoul.com

 

Cut from the same dough

When I was growing up, they were simply “Christmas cookies” to me—not butter cookies or cutout cookies. Just Christmas cookies: the quintessential sweet of the season.

Of course, there were many cookie varieties on the platter my mom kept stocked on the kitchen counter throughout the holiday season. I had to taste each of the others at some point—the gingerbread, the mini pecan pie shells, the coconut and chocolate “magic bars,” and the shortbread squares with salty cashews pressed into the caramel on top. But when the platter was offered with the instruction to “just take one,” my small hands only hovered over other choices before inevitably gravitating back to a beloved “Christmas cookie.”

cookietinAs an adult, I consider these classics a family recipe, but in truth, the five-ingredient list is hardly complicated, or a secret: butter, flour, sugar, an egg, and—most importantly—a half-teaspoon of real almond extract (imitation is forbidden!). First, as with all cookies, the butter and sugar are creamed together before adding the egg and almond extract. Then the flour is carefully stirred in. For years I had to hand over the spoon to my mom when the last cup of flour went into the bowl, and for years I was in awe of how strong she was, as I watched her effortlessly finish the job my wimpy arm couldn’t handle.

scookiecutterAfter the dough was chilled (a step I was never a fan of waiting through), my mom and I rolled it out to a careful ¼-inch thick round ready to be puzzled into Christmas shapes. It was with Christmas cookie dough that I learned to use a rolling pin: gently but firmly, keeping the pressure even between left and right hands, learning to lift the rolling pin slightly as it reached the outer perimeter of the dough, so as not to leave the edges too thin to be cut.

Opening up the tin of cookie cutters each December was as thrilling to me as unearthing my family’s boxes of tree decorations. All the old favorite shapes were there—stocking, tree, candy cane, wreath, star, santa, and the gingerbread boy and girl (which we didn’t hesitate to use on non-gingerbread dough)—as well as the surprise of a new cookie cutter or two we had added to the collection the year before. I learned to be strategic about arranging each shape before pressing it into the dough, minimizing the scraps of dough to be gathered and rolled out again. The outstretched leg of the reindeer nicely made use of a little strip of available dough left along the top of a tree’s point, and the positive points of one star could utilize the negative spaces left by another star.

Frosting and decorating the cookies, though, was the best part of the process. The bowls of colored frosting and various sprinkles were laid out on the table, drawing the whole family as if they were a feast rather than work to be shared. Over the years, our approach became increasingly elaborate and creative. Armed with toothpicks, we discovered techniques for swirling two or more colors of frosting in the middle of a star, and for picking up and placing tiny candy balls exactly where we wanted them, along the hem of an angel’s dress. In his teens, my brother went rogue with his approach, transforming traditional shapes into entirely different objects—an upside-down stocking became a hobby-horse, and bell became a space shuttle, with USA spelled out carefully using those small, stick-shaped chocolate sprinkles.

As a college student, making and decorating “Christmas cookies” was always my first order of business upon arriving home after finals. Years later, after having my own children, I could hardly wait for them to be old enough to sit around the kitchen table and decorate cookies with Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Bill. When I eventually met Jason, I knew immediately he and his daughter would embrace the slightly-competitive fun of our family’s cookie decorating marathons. (A man who would scoff at such an activity would be no man for me!)

Our three daughters are now teenagers, and the “Christmas cookie” tradition continues—even beyond Christmas. Somewhere along the line, it occurred to me that “Christmas cookies” could be made at other times of the year, so I began buying new cookie cutters: tulips and rabbits, pumpkins and maple leaves, hearts and snowflakes.

photo (2)A few weeks ago, on a cold Saturday morning, we sat down around the dinning room table, where stacks of naked autumn cookies waited for their sweet, creative disguises. Each of the girls had invited a friend to join us. “I didn’t realize other people even did this any more,” one of our guests said, picking up a toothpick and getting intricate with her design.

The cookies are definitely special—everyone who sees them and bites into one agrees. But for me, it’s the tradition of time spent together—evolving as our family evolves, yet remaining the same from year to year, in a life where it seems nothing really remains the same—that I crave most this time of year.