D R A M A++Q U E E N

Tell us about an outing with your kids that went way, way wrong. Send your tales to Drama Queen

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

A counterculture childhood
By Lisa Michaels
In an excerpt from her new book, the author remembers being 3 years old and waving a Viet Cong flag
(07/15/98)

Beach babble on
By Polly Shulman
A selection of books immerses kids in a wetter, wavier world
(07/14/98)

A masterful Machiavellian matriarch
By Lesley Gold
For 24 years Rep. Pat Schroeder cleaned two houses
(07/13/98)

Cracking down
By Jeff Stryker
Paying addicted mothers not to have children
(07/10/98)

The demise of discipline: Second of three parts
By Sallie Tisdale
It's not enough to pour love into children
(07/09/98)

BROWSE THE FEATURE ARCHIVES

- - - - - - - - - -

Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - -

SLICE OF LIFE | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -

My first child is now 9 years old, and I have made the cake successfully maybe a dozen times. I have made that cake unsuccessfully three times as often. Sometimes my husband will come home and see a caramel cake on the counter, and he is visibly relieved. "Dodged that bullet," he will mutter. For I am known to curse, scream, yell and particularly to jump up and down when I am making caramel frosting. On occasion, I have thrown things. Woe be to the child who falls or needs help in the bathroom, woe be to the UPS man who rings the bell or the person who phones, for I am a monomaniacal witch during that 20-second interval that I have to frost the caramel cake.

I went back to the beach last summer for the first time in 10 years. We arrived in the evening, hot, sticky and cramped as usual. My mother was on the phone immediately, ordering up our caramel cake. At 10 the next morning, we put our money under the duck tureen on the kitchen table, like always, and then went out for a bike ride. We returned to find a caramel cake, still warm, on the counter and the change from our $20 bill under the duck's feet. Still warm, I mused, is that part of the trick? I thought you were supposed to let your sugar syrup cool before beating it. Maybe you are supposed to beat it warm! Of course, it's probably more complicated than that: Let it cool slightly -- to lukewarm or "warm to the touch," or one of those other authoritative and ambiguous cookbook phrases.

I learned other secrets about the Cake Lady that summer. That her name, for instance, is Liv Wurst (could Dickens himself have made up a better one?) and she is something of a controversial figure in our coastal town. There are those who believe she uses a cake mix. I don't -- I feel sure that by now she has her cakemaking down to such a science that she can do it from scratch more quickly and cheaply than with any mix. I do think there is something artificial in her cakes, though -- maybe imitation vanilla or butter-flavored Crisco. Undoubtedly this is a cost-saving measure she thinks no one can detect, but I think this is where the cake-mix contingent comes from.

Other things were whispered to me as well last summer. My mother's friend Harriet told me, over shrimp cocktail at the Beach Club, that Mrs. Wurst was living with a man "without benefit of clergy." The Cake Lady shacking up! She also is rumored never to eat her own cakes, at least not lately -- she has lost 30 pounds in the past year. But Mrs. Wurst told me herself that she doesn't abstain: "I had me some cake for lunch today," she said one day when we were chatting on the porch after a cake drop-off. Instead, she says, her dramatic weight loss is the result of cutting back: "I take only one package of half and half, instead of two, when I go out for coffee," and "I switched from whole milk to 2 percent to 1 percent, just as easy as you please." Could it be that the naysayers are just jealous? After all, Mrs. Wurst has a slender new figure, a new boyfriend and a thriving business. Certainly her cake production hasn't fallen off any. Last year during Easter week, she made 63 cakes, she told me. She took off all of the next week, but by the end she was antsy to get back to work.

This summer we have already made our pilgrimage to the coast. We ordered three cakes while we were there and I finally realized why it is that I cannot replicate the taste of the Cake Lady's caramel cake. Her cake is for me the taste of summer on the North Carolina coast, interwoven with the sultry freedom of riding bikes over hot tar, catching fish from the end of the pier and clamoring up and down the steps with a pack of sunburned cousins. I can make a decent cake these days, one that is fine for celebrations and family dinners and birthday parties, but it will never be the Cake Lady's cake -- even if she gave me her recipe. And looking at my children the last night we were there, I saw that she was now an inextricable part of their beach vacation too. Sitting in front of the television, balancing huge slices of caramel cake on their plates, they were cross-eyed with the pleasure of it all -- the cake, lightning bugs in a jar, sand between their toes, staying up late -- and I knew that I could never re-create all that for them outside this house. And with that thought in mind, I had me some cake.
SALON | July 16, 1998

Maurine Shores is a regular contributor to the "Our So-Called Lives" column in the San Jose Mercury News.

Recipe for Hot Milk Cake With Caramel Icing