Baking Cakes

For Jasper's 15th

Hola, Miracles ~

I ask my oldest child what kind of cake he wants for his birthday, and he tells me he wants THE CAKE. I know the one he is talking about. The ground pecan cake.

The recipe for this cake has been in our family for at least four generations. The making of this cake has frustrated at least four generations of bakers…I am the latest in that line. Or I was.

The ground pecan cake, like many worthwhile things including almost fifteen-year-old boys, is both beloved and difficult.

The original recipe came down from my great-great grandmother who got it from a neighbor in El Paso when that city was just a small West Texas town in the middle of some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world. My great-great grandmother Anita passed it down to her daughter, Stella, who passed it down to her daughter-in-law, Susan. Susan, my paternal grandmother, was an excellent cook and one day, not too long before I went off to college, she had me come over and she revealed the secret to me…the making of the ground pecan cake.

I needed to know how to make it, she told me, because one day she would be dead, and it was my dad’s favorite cake.

So, I spent a morning in her tiny kitchen, and I learned how to make it. And then, one day years later, after she had died, it was time for the cake to be made for a family party, and so make it I did. It wasn’t a disaster. Everyone liked it. But it also wasn’t what I would call easy, and I certainly knew it could be better.

A years-long dance ensued between me and this cake. I am still the only person in our extended family that makes it, and each time it came out good, but not, to my mind, good enough.

Then, late last year I had an idea. I called on a friend for help. My friend happens to be a Michelin-rated dessert chef here in San Antonio and a former student of my husband’s. I sent her the recipe, told her my issues, and waited for her advice. After looking it over she informed me that my (and by extension, my ancestors’) approach to this cake had been incorrect. We were not making a regular cake. We were making a sponge cake.

Those of you who bake know what that means. If you aren’t a baker I won’t go into all of the details, but suffice it to say, a sponge cake requires a different approach in many respects…from the sequence in which you mix in ingredients to the level of power and strength you use in the mixing itself. Sponges require, as you might imagine, a lighter touch.

So, armed with a new and correct sequence, I set about my cake making and wouldn’t you know it, they came out beautifully. I just repeated this for my son’s birthday and again…beautiful.

I look at the recipes for this cake. I have hand-written versions from my great grandmother, another great grandmother, and my grandmother. I have a typed-out version from one of the grandmothers too. Each version is slightly different. A refinement here, a change in measurement there. Each version is signed off…this is Stella’s, this is Susan’s.

Now I have my version. It is the most detailed and has specific sequence instructions—because sequence matters in cooking just as it does in medicine and magic. I will credit my chef friend so that those who come after me know where the refinements came from.

And it strikes me, as I’m icing the cake with the homemade whipped cream frosting, that this is like so much of life.

We begin with one set of stories, ideas, ingredients. And each year, each phase, they change. They are refined. Some are lost. New additions are folded in. Sequences are changed or perhaps noticed for the first time. And sometimes we all need help—the objectivity of an expert, a friend, an outside eye—to support us in finding the best way forward. It’s true for our lineages and it’s true for each of us as individuals.

As I prepare to celebrate the fifteenth birthday of my oldest child I reflect on all that he has been through…the losses, the crises, the struggles. But also, all that he has gained and all that he has accomplished. The night before his birthday he was playing cello in the heart of the city on the grounds of the Alamo for a private event. Tonight, he will be performing again. We have just selected his courses for his freshman year of high school, and he has the hardest course load and is so ready for it.

The fact that he does all this while being half blind is something I now forget half of the time. Most people who meet him don’t even know until he clues them in.

Life has left its mark. The ingredients shifted in some pretty dramatic ways for him. And yet here we are, blowing candles out on a homemade cake that gets better and better with each passing year.

He takes a bite and grins. His phone buzzes with texts from friends and he goes to answer them.

Life, Miracles, is sweet. And the recipe? It keeps getting refined. Yours does too.

xoxo,

Bri