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.