On The 7th Day, They Baked. And It Was Good.

I don't really consider myself a baker.  I guess because I much prefer the taste of savory to sweet and in my mind baking = sweet (though of course that's an overly narrow association: see focaccia).  Natalie, however, was born with a lollipop in her mouth I think, and Jack will just plain eat everything. So, as Jack has continued his gorging ways, and as Natalie has become more interested in helping me in the kitchen and I have naturally wanted to encourage that, I've been doing a lot more baking this past year.

Take a couple of weekends ago, for example.  We started with cookies because we happened to have two partial bags of baking chips - one  chocolate and one butterscotch - that had slowly been whittled away by nibbling children in search of something sweet, and half a bag of shredded, sweetened coconut.  Inexplicably, they seemed destined to meet in a cookie.

From there we suddenly decided that a cake was needed.  For a Birthday? Dinner party? Nope.  We just needed a cake.  And for some reason it came to me that we needed my Mom's Chocolate Angel Food Cake - my favorite while growing up and the one I requested for my Birthday every year.  

In fact, the first year I was away at college my Birthday happened to coincide with a business trip that my sister Judy had in Oakland. So my Mom baked the cake the night before, frosted it that morning at about 6:00 am, and made Judy carry it on her lap on the plane so she could deliver it to me at my dorm that morning, before the meeting.  Judy was traveling with colleagues and I am certain they thought our family was nuts.  And I think they were late to the meeting.  But that was the best Birthday cake I've ever had.

The only time I had ever made this cake before was alongside my Mom when she came to town after Natalie was born and I realized that I would need that recipe some day.

One might think that would be enough.  No.  There were bananas that were just reaching their brown and rotting peak for banana bread.  This is another of Mom's recipes that I grew up with and that all of my friends throughout my school years agreed was the best banana bread they had ever had ("please don't tell my Mom I said that").  Now my kids - and their friends - know it as the perfect rendition.  Once when Nat, Jack and I were home in Tacoma for Christmas, Judy baked a loaf for us to take back to CA.  It seems my Mom's recipes are good travelers (there's another family story about the cookies - I think - that my Mom mailed to my sister in Louisiana when she was there with VISTA during the height of the civil rights movement.  I think Mom had to call the governor of LA to get them to her - for her Birthday).

Sadly - I didn't get a picture of the bread itself, but as proof that this recipe is The recipe, I share a picture of the recipe card, which clearly demonstrates the use (and abuse) it has seen since Mom gave it to me shortly after I was married.  This is easily the one thing I have made most often, though typically without the nuts that dot the loaves Mom makes.
I love the simplicity of my Mom's recipes: the ingredients, the necessary oven temperature and time, and very little else.  What this recipe lacks, for instance, is the tip that each of these ingredients can be added in succession to a food processor and mixed up in no time at all, with minimal mess.  Or that the bananas should be very ripe.

Likewise with her recipe for the cake.  Just a list of ingredients with the briefest instruction following each one.  Missing: the only thing you frost this cake with is sweetened whipping cream, which will melt if you leave it out too long.  Of course Mom wrote these down from memory - she doesn't follow a recipe that she reads, like I need to do; she just makes it.  Perfectly.  Every time.  For someone who told me later in life that she always hated cooking, Mom sure managed to put out some delicious food.      

Sigh. Are we finished yet?  No.  For some reason we were compelled to make something else that we could decorate.  We'd made cookies, a cake, and bread.  What was left?  Cupcakes!  So....

Honestly.  We didn't eat all of this ourselves.  We shared.

And then, we rested.

AMEN.