Living Up to a Memory

When we were kids growing up, we had a breadman (and a milkman, but that's another story).  Three times a week, the truck with the big windmill painted on the sides would pull up and out would come the Awrey Bakery delivery man with his big tray hanging from straps on his shoulders.  With a large family, he always had 2 or 3 loaves of bread to leave with us.  But he also brought up an assortment of cakes, pies, and cookies to hawk.  Sometimes, Dad would let us choose a treat.  That was my first introduction to carrot cake.  It was pale orange-gold with white frosting in a small 8 inch square foil pan.  It would get cut into 6 very even pieces and everyone got just one.  There was to be no fighting over the cake and with 5 children plus Dad, there were certainly no leftovers.  That one piece was heaven, or so I thought.

In retrospect, it wasn't a particularly good carrot cake.  It had no texture, no visible carrots, no nuts, no raisins, and a overly sweet white frosting.  It was the idea that it was a special treat that made it taste so good.  Funny thing, I don't think I ever understood that carrot cake was really made from carrots, and that cake did nothing to educate me.

Some years later, I was determined to reproduce that sweet treat, so I started with a cookbook.  It was a real surprise to find out that carrot cake should be packed with sweetness from real carrots and fruits, and contrasted with the bitter bite of fresh nuts.  The sour tang of cream cheese on top elevated it to a new level.  At the time, my brother and I lived together.  He may not remember all the trial and error that we tasted in getting to the ultimate, but eventually I arrived at a cake that we both declared perfect!

Fast forward 20 or 30 years.  I was visiting my brother's family in Indiana, and we all went out to dinner.  When the orders were taken for dessert, the conversation came 'round to the carrot cake option.  John expressed that it was his favorite cake, and his wife interjected that she never had and never would bake him a carrot cake.  Apparently, he had told her many times over the years that I made the all-time best carrot cake.  The wise woman he married knew that she could never compete with or live up to a memory.  It really didn't matter whether my cake was good or not, nor if hers was.  It was all about the memory.

Over the years, I've made a lot of carrot cake.  I've improved the frosting, taken it from a simple square snack cake to an elegant layer cake, gussied up the presentation.  But the recipe itself hasn't changed.  I'm still making the same cake that I worked out in the 1970's.  You just don't mess with a good thing.

Recipe after the jump - click on 'Read More'.

Mom's Chip & Date Cake and the bridge party

There's a story to this (actually 2 stories), so bear with me a minute.

My mother was a bridge master. The card game. It's sorta like being in the pros. And she had a group that came regularly to the house to play just for practice when they weren't in tournaments. Well, she had baked a cake, and left it out to cool while she went to get ready. I was all of 6 or 8 years old. And I wanted just one warm chocolate chip from the cooling cake. ............and one more............. and just one more.............

I'll bet you can guess the ending. Mom came out, and I had picked off every single chocolate chip from the top of the cake! Yup. I don't actually remember getting punished, but I'm sure I did.

Now Mom wasn't much a a fancy cook. She was actually the Queen of Convenience Foods. (She was a bridge master, after all. Oh - and a cop, but that's a different story). Most stuff came from a mix or a box, except for the occasional recipe from the red checkered cookbook or a magazine clipping. We're talking about 1960 or so. "Foodies" were unheard of.

Fast forward 50 years. I'm flipping through a recently acquired cookbook, Death By Chocolate, by Marcel Desaulniers. The book won the James Beard Award for Best Dessert Cookbook a few years back. In there is a recipe called "Mom's Chocolate Chip and Date Cake". He tells a long story about this being the recipe of the mother of a friend of his. And other than he throws in 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder, it's the same cake! So now MY mom's chip and date cake is in his book as HIS mom's chip and date cake!

Now my mom has been gone since 1968, so I can't ask her where she got it, but I'm quite sure that if he really researched it, he'd find that his special cake was from Redbook or Better Homes & Gardens back in the 1950's.

The moral: We all have a great award winning cookbook in us. We just have to cull through our mothers' old clippings!

Recipe after the jump - click on 'Read More'.