The Cakes my Mother Made

           My recent enthusiasm for baking has brought back memories of the cakes my mother used to make.  I’m not sure whether they would be considered pound cakes or sponge cakes.  They were just “mummy’s cakes.”  Or, to others, “Duru Aunty’s cakes.” 

In our extended family in India, for a long time, we were the only ones with an oven.  The house we lived in, provided by the company my father worked for, had a western-style stove that had an oven below, unlike the counter-top stoves at my relatives’ homes.  So my mother was the source of all the homemade cakes our family enjoyed.

            I remember squatting on the kitchen floor once, next to newspapers that were spread out under bowls of flour and other ingredients.  I was too young to help, I was told.  I could only watch.  I remember the sweet smell of vanilla as the cake came out of the oven.  I remember wanting to eat it right away, when it was hot and sweet, but having to wait.  Some of the batter had been put into small, aluminum cups in pretty shapes with scalloped edges.  The mini cakes were like madeleines.  I had to wait until they cooled before I could eat one. 

By the time I was a teenager, my mother wanted to teach me how to cook.  But, by then, I wasn’t interested.  I was willing to chop vegetables—I enjoyed it, even—and I was always willing to eat what my mother cooked.  In fact, she asked me to taste everything she made.  “Is there enough salt?” she’d ask.  When she tried to teach me how to cook, though, I’d get bored and walk away. 

This changed when I was in grad school.  I no longer had access to college cafeteria food and needed to learn how to cook.  In the process of asking my mother about the meals I grew up eating, I asked for her cake recipe.

I still laugh about that recipe.  She told me how many eggs and how much flour and how much butter, but when it came to the milk, she said, “Keep adding milk until the batter flows easily off the spoon.”  So I wrote down exactly that.  Thinking of that recipe helps me to understand why I have rarely baked before: I don’t have much practice with precise measurements and sometimes feel confined by them. Until recently, I would look at recipes with their lists of numbers and feel overwhelmed and restricted.  So I didn’t bake much. 

Cooking on the stove is different.  I can add ingredients as I taste the food, and since I often cook food I am familiar with, food I grew up eating, I know how it should taste and know how I want to alter it (usually I add more chilies in it than my mother would).  And on the stove, I can work with the quirky recipes my mother gives me (her recent instructions on gaajar in methi will be material for another blog; I will tell you though the end result was absolutely delicious).

Recently, though, perhaps in part because of the blissful Thanksgiving morning I spent making stuffing from a recipe (http://transplantedontheprairie.blogspot.com/2011/11/i-would-rather-be-here-now.html), I am drawn to the process of baking.  I don’t mind measuring precisely, working on a counter covered in cups and spoons to help me.  I take out the wonderful wooden spoon I reserve for mixing cake and muffin batter and feel pleasure as I stir the ingredients in the big, green Pyrex bowl that my partner, Marilyn, has had forever.  I follow recipes and make notes on them about what I notice.  Mixing the ingredients in the bowl makes me happy. 

My new enthusiasm for baking makes me think that we get to move on, to grow.  I still alter recipes, as I did recently when I added strawberries to blueberry lemon muffins, but I no longer feel overwhelmed as I flip through recipes with unfamiliar ingredients and lists of measurements.

One day soon, I’ll pull out the recipe for the cake my mother made, one I haven’t tried in about twenty years, and I’ll bake it again.  Maybe this time I’ll measure how much milk it takes to get the batter to flow off the spoon just right.  And maybe I’ll even tell my mum.