I was brought up around cake. My father owned a bakery, and we lived right upstairs from it. I know cake from the inside, where it's made, on huge slabs of wood, the workstation, where cakes are made. The huge dough churning machines. My father's hands, kneading dough. The way he would decorate trays of cakes with speed and precision, as if the buttercreme bag was a gun.
I watched each time in awe when he would create buttercreme roses on a little pedestal, pushing out each delicate leaf, and decorating a wedding cake with dozens of these, white on white.
There was a huge barrel of sugar, with a scooper in there. I remember fetching sugar from there for our own stuff upstairs. We always had cake in the house. That was a given. My mother's sweet tooth, my father's penchant for it. I remember his 7-layer cake being around a whole lot. I can almost taste it now. I always counted the layers.
I always had the best birthday cakes. Mmm, birthday cake -- can't you just taste it?
In my novel there is always chocolate cake or rhubarb pie available for consumption.
My father was a chemist and my mother a social worker. That woman could not flip an egg and I swear when she discovered you could microwave a scrambled egg she was in hog heaven.
ReplyDeleteThe old man though, he understood the chemistry of cake. He could whip one out half drunk that was as good as any that could be bought. One of my favorite memories is my mother taking one of his eight layer tort cakes down the street to her bridge club.
I am sure none of her friends knew who made the cake but the plate always came back empty.
Oh Lord. If I lived above a bakery I would weigh 400 pounds. Fortunately I grew up in a fish camp. Fish and shrimp were our staples. My dad was the cook in our family too. Mom was OK, but she thought frozen vegies were the cat's meow. Of course, they both grew up during the Great Depression, pre-refidgeration when you had to pretty much eat everything daily before it spoiled. Good grief, I've done it again. Don't have a clue where I'm going with this but enjoying your post marathon none the less.
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