December 26: Japanese Fruit Cake

Japanese Fruit Cake is the traditional Christmas cake for my mother's side of the family, though it is not a fruitcake.  Come to think of it, I am not even sure why it is claimed to be Japanese.  But I won't question tradition because it is absolutely one of my favorite cakes; spicy, buttery, fruity and rich.  I don't remember celebrating a Christmas without it.  I even have a Japanese Fruit Pie recipe, containing all of the same fruits and flavors, that is nearly as good.

The cake contains two layers of plain butter (1-2-3-4) cake alternated with two layers of spice cake containing allspice, cinnamon, cloves and raisins "chopped fine."  In between the layers is a lemon and coconut filling which requires natural coconut.

Alternating layers with filling

The recipe calls for "1 good-sized cocoanut, grated."  Natural coconut is perfect because it is not pre-sweetened like commercial, flaked coconut, so the filling is not overly sweet.  However, opening a coconut, peeling, then grating the meat is a chore.  There were a couple of years in the 1990s when Mom and I couldn't find nary a coconut in the grocery stores...

One year, we had to buy three coconuts in three different trips to three different stores.  First, we searched several stores, finding no coconuts.  Then, each time we found one that sounded good, i.e. heavy and sounding sloshy-full of coconut water, we took it home, cracked it, and found the meat moldy, smelly or both.  That year we gave up and bought flaked coconut and were able to finish the cake in time for Christmas.  The next year the same thing happened on our first attempt to find a suitable coconut, so we gave-in to the flaked stuff and cut our losses.  Ever since then, the prospect of buying a coconut at Christmas becomes a catalyst for much well-wishing, many prayers, and crossed fingers.

These days, I think that more people cook with natural coconut.  Plus, I live in an area of town with a large Asian community, so I was pretty confident in my ability to find a decent specimen.  I found one at my neighborhood grocery on my first attempt and it turned out to be a winner.  The way Mama Judy cracked a coconut was to drive an ice pick into two or three of the eyes of the coconut to poke holes to the center, and then turn it eyes-down on a glass and leave it to drain.  Keith had his drill in the house for another job, so with a clean drill bit we created the holes.   No stabbing required.  I then placed the drained coconut in a hot oven (about 400 degrees) and checked on it every few minutes.  The heat caused the cocoa-brown hard shell to crack.  After removing the shell, the thin brown inner shell could be removed with a vegetable peeler revealing the gorgeous white nut meat.

In most cases the nut meat cracks along with the outer casing, but this time, it came out whole like a big, sweet, oily pearl.  I stood back and looked at it for a few minutes; it seemed almost a shame to cut it up and grate it.  Although, maybe I was just dreading the grating.

There is nothing more dangerous to the skin on one's knuckles than having to grate coconut.  The grating was always one of my jobs during the cake baking when I was little.  This kid greased the pans with butter, cut the wax paper circles for the bottoms of the pans, dredged the raisins with flour, and grated the coconut.  I grew up with both a respect and a fear of the box grater.  If the cakes hadn't always been such a delicious reward for the dangerous work, I might have been terrified by the grater into adulthood.

It has been years since I have made a Japanese Fruit Cake on my own.  Mom usually makes it at her home and brings it over on Christmas day.  When my mom gave me a copy of Southern Cooking by Mrs. Dull for Christmas 1989, she had written helpful advice on page 231, the Japanese Fruit Cake recipe.  Her notations told me how long to bake the cakes, how much juice a lemon is expected to yield, and how to tell when the filling is the right consistency.  Mom always used the filling as the frosting on the outside of the cake.  I made the filling according to Mrs. Dull, but I ended up with only enough filling to go between the layers.  Mom had forgotten to note in my book that the recipe needed doubling.  I didn't have another coconut prepared to make more filling at the last minute.

Mrs. Dull's recipe instructed to cover the cake with white icing.  Seven minute frosting would be too sweet, and I knew that Autumn liked the spice cake layers with Universal White Frosting.  The Universal White Frosting recipe is from Stressed is Just Desserts Spelled Backwards by Sheryl Meddin and Bennett Frisch (see Myers's Rum Cake, November 7).  It is an amalgam of buttercream and cream cheese frostings and it goes very well with any spice cake.

So, my resulting cake was pretty and delicious, but not exactly the exotic, fruity traditional Christmas cake covered in fruit filling that we always have.  Maybe not a groundbreaking new tradition, but it was a festive Saturday Cake for Boxing Day.  I wrote a note in my cookbook to double the filling recipe and put the grater safely back in the cabinet without incident.

Next Saturday: A Review of a Year of Saturday Cakes

December 21: My Gluten-Free Pound Cake

It continues to be a week of baking here!  We visited Columbia friends and relations over the weekend, so I just got around to baking my Saturday Cake on Monday.  I chose my GF pound cake loaves to give one as a gift and to have a treat for myself.  I deserve a treat or two this time of year because Christmas means cookies, hundreds of cookies, boxes of cookies...

Our family gives boxes of homemade cookies to our neighbors, teachers, friends and coworkers every year.  This tradition evolved out of longstanding practices and fond remembrances of our childhood.  For me, Christmas has always meant time in the kitchen.  Mom and I always made a cake for Christmas Dinner.  On Christmas Eve, my parents and I would have a picnic on the floor under the Christmas tree and we were allowed to open one present at the picnic before heading to midnight mass.  The picnic was usually sandwiches or cold dishes like fruit, cheese and pâté.  Starting in middle school, I was the chef for Christmas Eve supper.  At first, I just selected and prepared the picnic fare.  But then I decided to go "gourmet" and pick a dish that I had never tried before.  I would make a list of ingredients and a game plan for the timing of the dinner, Mom would help me shop and then I did the rest.

Cookies for Teachers, 1981

Before Christmas Eve though, Mom and I baked gingerbread cookies.  We made dozens of gingerbread cookies to give as gifts and we kept some to serve at our picnic.  When I was a freshman in high school, I made ginger-caricatures of my teachers.  Each character cookie was about nine inches tall and was presented in a box on the last day before holiday break.

While in the Secret Service, I made gingerbread and other cookies to share on Christmas day for all of us working at the command post or duty desk.  After my shift on Christmas, I hosted an open house for friends, colleagues and neighbors who couldn't travel.  The open house tradition of sparkling wine, egg nog and finger foods on Christmas afternoon continued until I retired from the USSS.

When we were dating in 2005, I made gingerbread cookies for Keith and the kids.  He loved the cookies and said that the flavor reminded him of some cookies called "fruit bars" from the Eclair Bakery in the Five Points neighborhood of Columbia.  Keith used to make a special trip to that bakery for a box of fruit bars to bring home to Georgia every time he visited Columbia.  He shared the fruit bars with friends and coworkers and eventually he started buying a couple of extra boxes in order to keep some for himself.  The Eclair closed during the 1990s and ever since then, he has been wishing for more of his favorite cookies.

He described the fruit bars to me in comparison to our gingerbread; the spice is the same, but the bars tasted fruitier, and the bars weren't crisp like the gingerbread, they were cookie-like on the outside, but chewy in the center.  There was a color difference between the golden-brown outside (top and bottom) of the bar and the soft, dark inside layer.

I fell in love with Keith and his nostalgia for fruit bars.  So, I was determined to figure out how to make the fruit bars he remembered.  I started with Mom's gingerbread recipe and then added, subtracted, took notes, asked for critiques and practiced through seven iterations until I got it right.

Now, South Carolina Fruit Bars are the foundation of our holiday cookie assortment.  We usually make three or four different types of cookies or small cakes for the boxes.  Fruit bars start the list and get the most compliments from recipients.  We even have a few people every year who beg for the recipe, but Keith says he will never allow me to share it!

We made 55 boxes of cookies this year plus a few dozen extra of each type for ourselves.  Each box is loaded with cookies, tied with a bow and delivered by the family dressed in hats like Santa's elves during Christmas week.  For a friend with a gluten-intolerant spouse, I made the gluten-free pound cake and packed it in a box marked "gluten-free."  Then I put the usual assortment of cookies in a box for her and tagged it, "full-of-gluten."

Yes, there are 40 pounds of flour and 28 pounds of butter in that cart!

This year the boxes contained Shortbread Hearts from The Silver Palate Cookbook (1982),  Christmas Cookies (rich butter cookies with cherries on top from Southern Living), and Bourbon Pecan Balls from The White House Chef Cookbook (1968) by René Verdon.

Verdon was the French chef chosen for the White House by Jacqueline Kennedy, a decision which garnered her much criticism at the time.  Cousin Pat gave me the cookbook as a gift when I was hired by the USSS and the Bourbon Pecan Balls were always a favorite at my open houses.  Some years we make gingerbread boys and girls and Apple Spice Bread.  When Keith worked for Georgia Shakespeare, we made Gingerbards (a silhouette likeness of William, himself, crafted out of gingerbread and royal icing).

But, the most important occupants in every box are the fruit bars that won Keith's heart.

The last cake of the year:  Japanese Fruit Cake

December 5 (well, 7th): The Chocoholic

I have a completely legitimate excuse for postponing my Saturday cake to Monday.

Wednesday, the 9th, was my son, Colin's fourteenth birthday and he chose this cake as his official birthday cake.

The Chocoholic as been on my list of cakes since early in the year.  The recipe is from Let Them Eat Cake: Classic, Decadent Desserts with Vegan, Gluten-Free and Healthy Variations by Gesine Bullock-Prado.  The cookbook was a Christmas present from my mom last year, and it is full of appealing recipes and beautiful photos of the desserts featured.  The best attribute of the book is that it provides a gluten-free version for each recipe; not just ingredient substitutions, but advice and tips to make a GF version turn out the same as the traditional.  I made Colin's Chocoholic using the basic recipe to try it out.  So that if it had turned out to be a disappointment, I could pinpoint the recipe as the problem, not the adjustments to make it GF.


 It was not, even remotely, a disappointment...

Although, the name of the cake has caused some chagrin in our family.  Keith and I have our own (some would say extensive) sets of grammatical pet peeves.  Please don't get me started on less-versus-fewer and why I won't shop at a grocery that has a "10 Items or Less" check-out line.  One of the burrs in Keith's language saddle is the attachment of "-aholic" to any word in a desire to note addiction or obsession.  "There is no such thing as shopahol or chocohol!" he rails. He feels the same way about "-gate" to denote a political scandal.  I love him so much!

Keith had a hard time finding fault with anything else on this cake.  And Colin has practically eaten the whole thing and it is only one day after his birthday.

The cake had three layers of delicious, dark chocolate cake, two layers of perfect chocolate mousse filling and it is covered all over with whipped chocolate ganache.  I am thrilled about how luxurious this cake is, how straightforward the directions in the recipe were and the fabulous potential for all of the gluten-free recipes in the book.

Colin has begged me to make The Chocoholic every week as my Saturday Cake in 2016.  I will take this under advisement, only if I can make the GF version.  The mousse and ganache tasted great, so I can't wait to try the whole thing.

This week, I am in serious-consideration-mode about what to write for Cake on Saturday in the new year; while a GF chocolate cake every week seems like a good idea now, I am afraid that I will become both bored and chubby in the process.


 Next Saturday (actually Sunday):  Sunday Night Cake

November 21: Peanut Butter Cake Supreme

I've been wanting to try this recipe for months, but other recipes kept taking precedence.  It is from The Carter Family Favorites Cookbook by Ceil Dyer (1977).  Who would know more about peanut butter than a peanut farmer who became president?

I bought the cookbook at an estate sale shortly before Former President Carter announced that he had been diagnosed with brain cancer a few months ago.  I was drawn to the book because I have other White House/presidential themed cookbooks.  As a Georgia native, how could I resist?

When President Carter was in office and this book was published, we lived in Conyers, a suburb of Atlanta.  I had attended Montessori schools since the age of 2 (see January 24: Allgood Pineapple Upside-Down Cake) and then attended Honey Creek Elementary in fourth and fifth grade. My parents' rule was that I was only allowed to watch two hours of television per week.

I had a terrible time deciding between Little House on the Prairie at 8pm on Mondays, The Waltons at 8pm on Thursdays and Wonder Woman, starring Lynda Carter, at 8pm on Saturdays.  I had the daunting task of keeping track which show's reruns to watch during holidays and summer break based on which shows I chose to watch during the regular season.  I would often get to watch whatever I wanted on TV at Mama Judy's and Papa's house when I spent the weekends there.  But, Mama Judy thought that Wonder Woman's costume was a little risqué, so I felt like I couldn't watch Lynda save America there.

This was all taking place during the Energy Crisis and President Carter would preempt broadcast shows for crisis updates and press conferences during the eight o'clock, prime-time hour.  It seemed to only happen on Mondays and Thursdays; the specific days that I was looking to get my precious TV allotment.  I would protest and complain to my Mom who would simply tell me that I would be able to watch the rerun, and to be quiet so that she could hear what the president was saying.

"Doesn't Jimmy Carter know that I only get to watch TWO HOURS of TV a week??!!"

I suppose that my mom got tired of listening to my protestations and told me that if I thought President Carter shouldn't broadcast during my prime-time shows, I should write a letter to the White House.  I did.  I cannot remember exactly what I said in the letter, but I received a form-letter response from the White House Correspondence Office a few weeks later.

Fifteen years after that, I applied to work for the US Secret Service and I remembered my complaint letter to the president.  The background investigation process sent Special Agents to talk to neighbors we had when I was three years old, former teachers, and employers.   It wasn't far-fetched to believe that they would also search some sort of White House database of letter-writers, too.  I was certain that sitting across from three senior agents for my hours-long panel interview, I would be asked about my complaint letter.  Worse yet, what if it would come up during the polygraph exam?  I worried about anything and everything.  The entire hiring process took two years and nine months from the time I applied until the job offer came (during which there was a government hiring freeze, most applications are processed in a year).  I was never asked about my TV letter once.  After being hired, I found out that the USSS only cares about letters that contain threats.

Peanut butter paperweight

The Peanut Butter Cake Supreme was actually pretty Ex-treme.  The recipe says to make it in four layers in 8' cake pans, but it turned out too tall for my cake dome!  It called for smooth peanut butter in the cake, along with self-rising flour.  The icing contains crunchy peanut butter and is cooked in a double-boiler.  I bought real peanut butter from Plains, Georgia at a roadside stand during the summer (re-run season).  But it was not sweetened, not salted and a little too crunchy for cake - not enough crunch for the icing.  I used Skippy instead.

The icing has a creamy, smooth consistency and looks alarmingly like some of my caramel icing fiascos - although here, the lumps are peanuts.  The cake is very soft and tender, but the icing is the very best part.  When I make this cake again, I will make it in 9" layers to make it less imposing and easier to store.  It might make fun cupcakes, too.

I have now acquired the Wonder Woman episodes on DVD, and I have some catching-up to do.
So, please excuse me...  Don't make me write a letter!

Next Saturday:  Granna's Nut Cake

November 14: Lemon Verbena Pound Cake

Saturday was my mother's birthday, but I didn't make her cake on Saturday.
There were more fantastic things than cake happening that day!

Gorgeous Mom, second from right

Saturday was the official opening of Conversations at the Eiteljorg Museum - a show featuring the work of the museum's 2015 Contemporary Art Fellows... of which my mother is one!  Her installation piece called Retracing the Trace, as well as some of her drawings, on display for the show, will become part of the museum's permanent collection.  Keith and I went to Indianapolis on Friday for the celebration and awards ceremony that night and stayed to visit the museum during the opening on Saturday.

Mom's gallery talks were very fine; they ignited many positive comments and interest from the attendees.  Retracing the Trace addresses the subject of sexual assault and specifically those sexual assaults which go unreported every day in the United States.  My mother is a survivor of a sexual assault in 1994; she was dragged off the road by a stranger during her morning jog in Piedmont Park in Atlanta.  Her rape was reported and investigated, but the police never found her attacker.  Mom has created art based on that experience in the past and has been very moved by the people who see her art and say "it happened to me, I was afraid to tell anyone."

The opening of Conversations was a lovely event and Mom has received great press coverage of her work, including an article in ARTnews online magazine.  Keith and I were incredibly impressed with the exhibit and the curatorial choices made.  Mom had a whirlwind week of docent training sessions, interviews, galley talks, catalogue signings, and PARTIES.  To give me a chance to bake, and her a chance to rest up for her birthday celebration, we postponed it until Monday.  I baked a Lemon Verbena Pound Cake on Sunday afternoon after I picked her up at the airport.

This recipe was one that my mother had been holding onto since 1989.  Like the Basil Pound Cake (see June 14), this cake recipe had been clipped from a magazine by my mom, and then passed to me for my Saturday Cakes.  Lemon verbena is my mother's favorite fragrance and the smell of it reminds me of her.  I've been saving this recipe for her birthday.

The recipe specifies "fresh" lemon verbena leaves to flavor the scalded milk for the cake.  I looked high and low for verbena at farmers' markets, gourmet stores, and nurseries, but I found none.  The recipe originally ran in the the August 1989 issue of House Beautiful.  I have to assume that in August 1989, verbena was easier to come-by than in November of 2015!

After some online research I felt confident that dried verbena could be substituted for fresh in a recipe, I just needed to use half as much.  The cake recipe calls for vegetable shortening instead of butter, which I found unusual for a pound cake.  The flavor of the cake comes from a small amount of almond extract in addition to the verbena-fragranced milk.  The cake is iced with a buttercream icing flavored with lemon extract.  The fragrance of the cake, once fully assembled, was rich and citrusy.

After dinner at our favorite neighborhood bistro on Monday night, we returned home for cake and the opening of presents.  Mom, Keith, and the kids loved the cake!  They suggested that the next time I make this recipe I try using butter instead of shortening to see how it turns out.  I will also strive to find fresh verbena next time to see how the cake differs.

I doubt that Mom has fully recovered from her week of celebration.  We need to start working immediately on planning her next birthday to make it top this one!

Tomorrow:  Peanut Butter Cake Supreme

November 7: Myers's Rum Cake

After Halloween's flailing, flying flop of a cake, I needed a great result this weekend.  Either that, or I would need to drown my sorrows.

Rum cake.

I think everyone who was alive in the 1970's and 80's has prepared, or at least eaten, the Bacardi Rum Cake recipe that appeared in Bacardi's magazine ads.  The recipe contains a yellow-cake mix, instant vanilla pudding and Bacardi Dark Rum.  Rich tasting and moist, but a little cloying from the mix+pudding, it was a staple at adult parties when I was growing up.  That recipe was one that I copied (by hand, on college-ruled notebook paper) to take to college in my collection of essential recipes from home.  Recipes for Mom's black raspberry cake, her spinach quiche, her spaghetti sauce, our friend's heavily-guarded-top-secret apple spice bread, Granna's chicken spaghetti, Granna's cornbread dressing, Judy's chess pie, Judy's pecan pie and fruit cobbler all had a place in my folder full of recipes.

During high school in Atlanta, in the 1980's, the ultimate treat was to go to The Dessert Place with friends.  We would order a dessert and coffee to celebrate a birthday or a fun outing at the Virginia-Highland location.  With our moms, would take a ladylike tea-time break from shopping and stop at The Dessert Place on East Paces Ferry in Buckhead.  The cream cheese brownies from The Dessert Place were the ultimate treat for me; the definition of indulgence.  A party with catered desserts from there was a symbol of good taste and luxury for my generation of Atlantans.

In the late 1990's, my mom became friends with Bennett Frisch, one of the two founders of The Dessert Place.  Bennett and her business partner, Sheryl Meddin, had just published a cookbook containing recipes for many of the popular desserts from their restaurant, Stressed Is Just Desserts Spelled Backwards.  I received and inscribed copy of the book as a gift from my mom when I was working for the Secret Service posted in Jackson, Mississippi.

While there is no recipe in the book for those fabulous brownies, there are many recipes that I love to use.  But, I had never made the Myers's Rum Cake.

After I decided to make this recipe, I found a fabulous new Bundt pan for the season.  It's called "Autumn Wreath," so I probably would have bought it anyway just to make cakes for our daughter. I had to buy it as a treat to make up for for last week's debacle.  The best part of the design of the pan, for this recipe, is the acorn-shaped crevices.  This recipe calls for greasing and flouring the pan and then adding toasted, chopped pecans and almonds to the bottom of the pan before filling it with batter.  So that the finished cake comes out with a crown of nut-filled nuts!

The recipe calls for using all purpose flour, and since I know it was written by an Atlanta baker, I chose White Lily All-Purpose because it is a traditional Southern flour.  After baking, the cake gets a sugar-butter-rum glaze while it is still hot in the pan.

This light and silky cake has lifted my mood.  It turned out spectacularly!  The glaze and nuts adorning the outside of the cake made it very attractive, especially in the autumnal-themed pan.  But the silkiness of the tender cake inside made it a real winner.  It had none of the sticky sweetness of its Bacardi & cake mix alter ego.  The rum flavor is subtle and the cake has just enough richness.

Success!

Next Weekend:  Lemon Verbena Pound Cake

October 31: Caramel Cake IV, The Final Chapter

Halloween is supposed to be scary.  So, what better time to embark on my fourth attempt to make a caramel cake.  Right?

Saturday started out with such potential:  I had already found a good recipe for the cake layers that had enough body for the heavy caramel (Nathalie Dupree's from Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking).  I made three lovely, level layers and set them out to cool on wire racks.  So far, so good.

The most promising development, since my last attempt, was an intriguing new recipe for the caramel icing.  I did not want to get my hopes up, especially because there was rain in the forecast for Sunday and the rising humidity could spell disaster for the caramel.

My friend, Ellen, took pity on me after my previous battles with caramel frosting and sent me this recipe.  Ellen is a native of Alabama and has many memories of the homemade caramel cakes served at funerals, church suppers and pot luck dinners over the years.  She has never made a caramel cake, but her family's southern pedigree is solid.  Ellen's parents own a large farm and Ellen inherited a green thumb.  She is the first person of my acquaintance who has successfully grown peonies in Georgia.  She is a career woman who values pragmatism while at the same time revering southern traditions.  A few years ago, after seeing a picture in the local newspaper of the local DAR chapter (picture a bunch of older ladies in hats wearing socks and orthopedic sandals with their dresses), she suggested that we "block rush" the DAR to shake up the establishment a bit, or at least inject a little style.

Ellen found the recipe for caramel icing in her recipe box.  It was one of her grandmother's recipes, handwritten on the back of a piece of paper with an Enfamil (baby formula) logo along with a note to "call Lou."  Ellen's grandmother, Christine Pinson, was known as "Blackie."  Blackie got her nickname in nursing school when nursing candidates were referred to as Miss (surname).  Blackie entered nursing school with her sister, and the confusion caused by two Misses Pinson led to the need for two official nicknames.  Christine with dark hair became "Blackie" and her sister, the blonde, became "Whitey."  Blackie became a public health nurse, hence the Enfamil paper.  Lou, also a nurse, was probably the source for the caramel icing recipe.

The recipe called for browning sugar in a skillet, then adding that to a mixture of evaporated milk, sugar and oleo (margarine).  In spite of my hesitation about using margarine, I tried it.  The recipe called for it, so I figured it was the accurate thing to do.  However, I also set some unsalted butter and a second round of measured ingredients aside to make a butter batch, just in case.

The first batch of sugar, I burnt in the iron skillet.

The next batch of sugar turned out fine and I moved on to bring the full mixture with milk and oleo to "soft ball" stage (240 degrees).  Or so I intended.  The batch never reached soft ball before burning to the bottom of the pan to such an extent, that I felt sure that the pan was ruined.

Results of the second batch, as black as my mood and potentially as dangerous.

So, after working up a sweat scrubbing the pan, I decided to try again.  By this time, the trick-or-treaters were out roaming the streets and I decided to blame goblins for the failure of that second batch.  After adjustments to the burner temperature, checking the accuracy of my candy thermometer and an internal pep talk, I was ready to try again.  Keith, meanwhile, had grown weary of my sighs and wary of my increasing frustration level.  He said "you know, you really don't have to make a caramel cake.  It's not like your Granna made them all of the time, she just said that her mother made them on Saturdays. I might even love you more if you don't make a caramel cake, ever.  I hate to see you like this."

The third batch, let me just be succinct, was another profound failure.  

Despite my attempts to remedy all of the possible errors from the second batch, I ended up scrubbing and scraping burnt sugar-tar from my favorite sauce pan.  There was grumbling, cussing and a welling-up of tears before I reached the zenith of my frustration.  I felt like Anthony Michael Hall's character in The Breakfast Club whose elephant lamp wouldn't light-up when he pulled the trunk.  I should be able to do this.

Why can't I make a caramel cake?  Why won't it light up when I pull the trunk?

Come and get it, opossums and birds!

At that moment of emotional overflow, I walked into the dining room and saw the pretty cake layers anticipating their icing.  Something snapped.  I told Keith to grab a bite of one of the cakes before it was too late, then I scooped up the cakes and marched out the door.  Then, I violently threw the cakes into the back yard watching them smash to bits against the old swing set.  

Let me backtrack briefly to remind you that I come from a proud line of women whose ultimate expression of anger toward an inanimate object is to throw it into the back yard.  My Mama Judy, in a particularly trying season in the 1950s, got so annoyed with an iron, that she hurled it out the back door - narrowly missing poor Papa's head.  The iron lay, rejected, in the backyard until Papa secretly picked it up and disposed of it sight-unseen by Judy.  There have been times in my life, and my mother's life, when throwing that offending toaster,  immersion blender, or computer mouse out the back door and leaving it there is the only alternative.  My cousin, Liz, refers to this state as "having a case of the Allgood Red-Ass."  I am pretty sure, based on the anecdotal evidence, that all of the Allgood girls have succumbed to the condition at some point.

I followed my attack of the "ARA" with a glass of wine as I sat on the couch and promised Keith that I wouldn't be attempting any more caramel cakes.  Besides, on Sunday I visited Granna and asked her why she thought my caramel cakes didn't work.  She admitted that she didn't remember ever making one.  So, I finally got a treat after all my tricky caramel disasters.  

The toothpick comes out clean, and I am done.

Next Saturday: Myers's Rum Cake

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

September 26: Hummingbird Cake

I am not sure why I've never made a Hummingbird Cake before.  It's a very popular cake in recipe books from the southern U.S.  There is much speculation about how the cake got its name and how it became popular in the South since bananas, cinnamon and pineapple are not native.  Much of the lore regarding the name comes from the sweetness and fruitiness of the cake being sweet enough to attract a hummingbird.  It seems like the cake's origin was from Jamaica (hence the tropical fruits) but the recipe proliferated after being featured in Southern Living magazine in the 1970's.

This recipe is from The Best of Georgia Farms cookbook, a collection of recipes from the Market Bulletin published by the Georgia Department of Agriculture.  It is an oil based cake, like a carrot cake, so it is moist and tender.  This Hummingbird Cake is far superior to a carrot cake (even mine, see March 28) because of the depth of flavor from the bananas.  Plus, there's never anything wrong with a cake containing both pecans and cream cheese frosting.  Perhaps it's called a Hummingbird Cake because it goes SO FAST.

My lack of experience with a Hummingbird Cake is even more baffling when I consider that it is my namesake cake.  Not a Samantha cake, Hummingbird Cake.  In Cherokee tradition, your mother's father names you, and in most respects the name is symbolic and not used on official documents like a birth certificate.  My mother's father, Blaine, named me Walelu (wah-leh-lu), hummingbird, at my birth.  I loved that I was named for a bird so quick and beautiful.  But the best attribute of hummingbirds, I think, is their bravery.  A hummingbird will fearlessly attack a much bigger bird, even an eagle, if its nest or family is in peril.  I know that bravery, like my name, comes from Blaine.

My full-blooded Cherokee grandfather was born on the reservation in 1915.  He was educated in a school on the reservation, run by the US government that kept children separated from their families not just by the content of the curriculum, but also by a tall fence.  His mother, Luzene Sequoyah Hill, had herself been removed from her family and shipped off to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania for her childhood education.  The government removed her from her family, changed her hair, her language and her clothes to train her to be a domestic for a white family.  Remembering the pain of her own loss and homesickness made her walk down the mountain every day to stand outside the fence of the reservation school to watch over her own children.

Blaine 

There is a long and proud tradition in Native America of volunteering for the U.S. armed forces.  Blaine followed this tradition and a family legacy; he enlisted for the U.S. Army in 1938 and joined the 82nd Airborne paratroopers.  He fought in World War II and returned home.  He also fought in the Korean Conflict with the 101st Airborne and logged over 100 jumps in his career.  Back home, he and another Cherokee veteran, in full uniform,  would be pictured in newspapers nationwide as they were turned away from voting in the state of their birth, North Carolina.  Even though indians received US citizenship and the right to vote in 1924, many states refused to allow them to vote.

Maggie and Blaine

Blaine met my grandmother, Maggie, in Cherokee, NC when her family was there on vacation in 1945.  During their courtship, my grandmother and her best friend, who was also dating a soldier, branded their beaux's initials on their thighs (at stocking-top level) using the blazing red tips of matches.  At the time, in Fulton County, GA, interracial marriages were against the law.  So, after being refused in Atlanta, Blaine and Maggie drove to Lawrenceville, the county seat of Gwinnett County, to be married by an agreeable judge after hours.  My mother, their only child, was born the following year.  As a part of Blaine's military career, their little family lived in Mainz, Germany for a time while my mother was in elementary school.  Blaine and Maggie stayed together for as long as their clash of cultures and family pressures would allow.  After returning from Germany, the marriage ended and Blaine moved away from Atlanta.

Blaine, Mom and Maggie

Split oak baskets dyed with butternut or black walnut foraged by Blaine

My mother saw Blaine only sporadically as she grew up.  He would come to town to visit her and bring her gifts.  He never stayed in Atlanta long.

After I was born, he would continue to make visits to town at least once a year.  He lived for a time in Chicago, IL, Nashville, TN, and on the Cherokee reservation.  Whenever he visited, he brought us fantastic gifts; occasionally, fancy, store-bought items, along with items he created using traditional Cherokee methods.  When I was about seven years old, he brought me an umbrella; navy blue with a gold-tone, plastic handle studded with plastic cabochon "jewels."  I had never seen such a fancy umbrella in all of my life and I was afraid to use it in case I ruined or lost it.  It made me feel like a Victorian lady, as did the pairs of gloves he brought me on several occasions.

Blaine was an artist, a terrific wood carver.  He made carvings of animals that he sold at craft stores in Cherokee.  He made an indian-head-carved violin for my mother who played violin in high school.  When I was in fourth grade, he made me a dulcimer, and I learned to play it from a Foxfire artist in the mountains of North Georgia.  When I was in the fifth grade, he visited and brought me a Cherokee blowgun he had made himself.  The gun was made from straight, hollow, river cane and he had made darts complete with rabbit fur fletching.  He showed me how to use the blow gun using a target painted on a cardboard box in our back yard.  Blaine gave us split-white-oak baskets using oak and natural dyes (blood root, yellow root, butternut & black walnut) which he hiked into the mountains to gather.  Also, he would bring us sacks of black walnuts that he had gathered in the woods, or trout he had just caught that morning in the mountains.

Some of Blaine's animals:  swan, crane, wolf, buffalo and an incongruous giraffe.

Dulcimer and violin

Almost every time Blaine came to visit me and Mom, Maggie seemed to know somehow that he had been there to see us.  For years, she would ask on the day of his visit or in the days that followed, "have you heard from Blaine?"  Maggie never remarried, and I believe she always carried a torch for her ex-husband.  Blaine died in 1992.  Maggie hadn't asked about him in a long time by then, but shortly after he passed, she asked my mom if he had died.

I am surrounded by Blaine's tangible gifts of art and the best thing he made, my mom, the artist.  Lately, I have been thinking about news stories on marriage equality,voting rights, racism, patriotism, and true bravery.  I have trying to rely more on the power of instinct. And I have been thinking about my grandfather who named me after a brave and beautiful bird.

Next Saturday:  Lemon Cake