October 3: Lemon Cake with Lemon Buttercream

Maggie Angeline Page Hill, wearing Blaine's Airborne Wings on a suit made by Mama Judy
in her engagement photo for the Atlanta newspapers.  The suit matched her blue eyes.

This weekend, my cake is one of my own recipes.  I developed this recipe for a Lemon Layer Cake with a tangy, buttercream frosting years ago when I was entertaining the idea of having a cupcake and tea shop upon my retirement from the Secret Service.  I have made cupcakes from the recipe for birthday parties, showers, and I even made hundreds of them for a fundraiser for Georgia Shakespeare.  It is an absolute favorite of everyone in our family.

Maggie with my mom at the beach

Any dessert with lemon has always been a favorite in our family and perhaps that is because it was a favorite flavor of Mama Judy who did the baking when my mother and her mother were growing up.  Tuesday the 6th is the 95th anniversary of my grandmother, Maggie's birth.

Mama Mag never did much cooking, but she made delicious cornbread and she loved to eat.  She always asked to go to restaurants that served the things she loved but never got at home; Judy cooked traditional southern dishes and baked perfect southern desserts.  But frog's legs, fried chicken livers, raw oysters and fried oysters all had to be enjoyed by Maggie when she went out to eat.  She had eclectic taste in foods and no fear of trying new things.

Maggie was not a traditional grandmother to me.  She lived with Mama Judy and Papa and they filled the "grandparent" roles when I visited.  Mama Mag was more like a playmate to me.  We sat on the floor and played  card games like Crazy 8's or Battle using sticks of Fruit Stripe chewing gum to place our bets.  She let me play in her makeup and with her costume jewelry.  She would sing and clap her hands to songs on the radio or music played by bands at the mall.  When I was a teenager, she would joke with me like she probably did with her girlfriends as teens.  We would be driving down the street and she would see a punk with a mohawk, or a hobo, and say to me "well, there goes your last chance..." then she would start to roll the window down to call him over.

In 1940, she was pictured in the Atlanta Journal at a jitterbug dance contest in Grant Park.  She was one of the contestants and she kept the newspaper clipping pressed in the family bible along with other flat keepsakes like her school diplomas, blood donation awards and corsages from who-knows-what occasion.  My mother turned the clipping into a collage for me as a reminder of my uninhibited and fun-loving grandmother.  Maggie always lived in-the-moment and didn't really care what people thought (much to her mother's chagrin in her rebellious youth).

"The sky's the limit and there ain't no sky" reads the caption from the Atlanta Journal

 Maggie was the luckiest person I have ever known, probably because she did live optimistically in the moment and she believed that she would win.  She won every contest or raffle she entered.  When I was in high school, on Friday nights, I would go with Maggie to weekly bingo at the retirement high-rise where she lived.  Friday night bingo with my grandmother?  Maybe Maggie was right to think that those undesirable fellows on the side of the road could have been my "last chance" at getting a date.  She won bingo every Friday.  The other residents hated to see her coming, I'll bet, because she not only won the games but usually the door prize raffle, too.

I never won a bingo game there, but I did win the door prize one night.  It was the first thing I had ever won.  The prize was a cake, donated by a local bakery for Branan Towers bingo night.

Maggie on our Florida road trip, 1987

Probably since the place was opened in the 1960s, Maggie had always wanted to visit Disney World, but she had never had an opportunity to go.  In the summer before I left for college, I took Mama Mag on a road trip to Orlando, just the two of us.  We did everything she most wanted to see:  the killer whale show at Sea World (she was disappointed when we didn't get splashed), Disney World (she loved the runaway mine train) and we walked around the world at Epcot.  Our main destination at Epcot was Germany so that she could enjoy weinerschnitzel and a beer at the Biergarten like the ones she remembered from her life in Germany.

Maggie died in 1994.  Hospitalized from respiratory failure, but determined and feisty to the end, she passed away after removing her own respirator tube when Mom and I stepped out of her hospital room for a few minutes.

Maggie had no fear, lots of memories and always expected to win and I'll bet you a stick of Fruit Stripe that she would have loved this Florida citrus cake for her birthday.

Next Saturday: Molasses Cake