Work--The Cake Curse

Why would writing a blog about work be so difficult for me? I started answering the phone for the family business when I was in grade school, and by the time I was 12, I was putting in time at the office.  I’ve worked in retail, fast food, and as a waitress. I’ve been a staff writer at a regional newspaper, an office supervisor, a logistics planner, a metallurgical technician, an editor, event planner, photographer and public affairs specialist. I’ve driven a fork truck and side loader and soared up over mining trucks in a cherry picker. Now I’m an author with short story collections available on the Internet and a book to be published sometime this spring or summer. But nothing is jumping out at me.

So I’m going to tell you about how my sister tried to teach me to do her work.

You might remember from my story, “The Anniversary Cake,” that my sister baked and decorated the cake for their 50th anniversary celebration. My sister was better in the kitchen than I even before she spent several years working for a caterer. And no place was this more evident than in baking cakes.

Not that I couldn’t bake a cake. I mean, you just open the box and pour it into a bowl and add the stuff the box tells you to add. I could do that. What I couldn’t do was get the darned thing out of the pan in one piece to make a traditional layer cake. I solved the problem by buying some attractive glass baking dishes. My kids endured years of sheet cakes for their birthdays.

When my brother-in-law, then in the Air Force, had to do TDY at a nearby air base with Thanksgiving coming up, it seemed like a good opportunity to invite my sister and their kids to spend some time with us. We’d cook Thanksgiving dinner together. It’d be fun!

“I’ll do the side dishes and you do the turkey and cake,” I suggested.

“I’ll do the turkey, but you have to help with the cake.”

“May I ask why?” My sister knew about the cake curse.

“I’m going to teach you once and for all how to take a cake out of the pan and decorate it.”

I went cold. This was not going to turn out well. “But you know what happens when I try to make a layer cake.”

“Nonsense. It’s easy. I’m going you to show you, step by step.”  She selected two identical pans and greased one of them with shortening. “Now you do the other one.”

I did, and she inspected it to make sure I’d covered it sufficiently. Then she sprinkled her pan with flour. I did the same, and again passed inspection.

Finally she poured half the batter in her pan and I poured the other half in mine. We slid them into the oven together, and when the allotted time had passed, pulled them out and tested them with toothpicks. After a short cooling period came the moment of truth.

My sister flipped her pan upside down and lifted it off, leaving behind a beautifully formed layer.  She nodded for me to follow her example. Hands shaking, I flipped my pan upside down EXACTLY AS SHE HAD. And when I lifted it off, the cake split right down the middle.

She stood with her mouth open.

And as you know from reading “The Anniversary Cake,” the curse is effective even when I don’t actually bake the cake. Apparently all I have to do is touch it for something horrible to happen.

My sister now believes in the cake curse. When she comes to visit, she brings her own kitchen. She and her husband park their RV in our drive, and I am not invited to help her bake.

REMEMBERING MYRTLE—The Bakery

My mother threw another pie into the garbage.

Don’t judge her. She was trying to duplicate her aunt’s piecrust—a nearly impossible task. After this attempt, the last of many, she gave up.

My Great-Aunt Myrtle, just Aunt Myrtie to me, was widowed shortly after I was born. She supplemented her small pension by baking for a local restaurant. She made the best sugar cookies I’ve ever tasted and pies that melted in your mouth like meringue, crust and all. And her meringue—well the only word that comes to mind is mist. People patronized the restaurant just to eat a slice of her pie.

Her home had a parlor and a porch in the front, and a kitchen in the back that ran the entire width of the house. She slept in the parlor, which was heated by an oil stove, instead of using the unheated bedrooms upstairs, sat to read her Bible in a wooden rocking chair beside her bed, and worked in the kitchen, which was warmed by a coal stove right in its middle.

On one side of the stove was the treadle sewing machine where she taught me to make quilted hot pads, and on the other side was the Formica-topped table that was her only work surface. With grey hair in a net-covered bun and an apron protecting her cotton housedress, she set to work.

She covered the tabletop with flour and rolled out the piecrusts with a huge wooden rolling pin. The crusts always came out perfectly round and just slightly larger than the pie pan. Usually the trimmings went back into the dough to make another crust, but sometimes she let me sprinkle them with sugar and cinnamon and eat them like cookies after they turned golden brown in her oven. No cookie was better, not even her sugar cookies.

When I was about 10, I told her that when I started junior high, my school would be only a couple of blocks from her house and I could come eat lunch with her. She smiled at me sadly. “I don’t think I’ll be around that long, Angel.”

I hadn’t yet experienced the death of a person I loved, so I shrugged it off. But her premonition was true. She died of a massive heart attack a year later.

I thought of her every time I left school to get lunch and had to walk past the bakery to get to Mike’s Ice Cream Parlor where most of us ate. Sometimes I didn’t even get to Mike’s, but stopped in the bakery for lunch. They made great fancy pastries, but their sugar cookies didn’t measure up to my Aunt Myrtie’s.

Years later, I, too, tried to duplicate her piecrust. Not as much of a culinary perfectionist as my mother, I kept trying and gradually got better and better. I discovered that those tasteless plums that grow nearly wild around the neighborhood make tasty pies, that grapes make a surprisingly good pie, and that yellow crook-necked summer squash make a better pumpkin pie than pumpkin does.

And one day, I pulled a pie out of my oven that looked especially promising. The crust was ugly as a mud fence, with cracks and bubbles all over the top, but something about it made me snap off an edge and lay it on my tongue.

Oh. My. God. It was almost perfect. At least it was the best piecrust I’d tasted since my Aunt Myrtie died. And my family didn’t even complain about how it looked.

I never did learn to make a pretty pie, and I don’t bake much any more. The kids are grown and have their own families that are nearly grown, and Hubby and I both have enjoyed way too much good food in the past. I’m proud of many things I’ve accomplished in my somewhat mundane life. But I will always feel a special rush of exultation when I remember that pie that was almost as good as my Aunt Myrtie’s.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011