Writing Life

My wife is a volunteer for Happy Tails, a private nonprofit animal shelter in Sacramento. A week or two ago we got an email informing us that Happy Tails would be holding a bake sale today to raise money for its shelter. Because I love to bake, I thought this would be a good opportunity to whip up some tasty treats while also making a contribution to a worthy cause. I planned to do all my baking on Monday, the 24th of August, and have it ready to deliver the next day. What I didn’t foresee was that, come Monday (yesterday), I would be fairly tired of baking after a long weekend of doing almost nothing else.

It all began on Friday, the 21st. I decided to make some vegetarian quesadillas for dinner that night. Whenever I make quesadillas or tacos or burritos, I always make fresh flour tortillas from scratch. Thus, Friday afternoon found me with my hands buried wrist-deep in a mixture of flour and shortening and water as I kneaded my ball of dough into shape. By the time my wife arrived home, I had produced eight perfect little homemade tortillas. That was my first baking project of the weekend, and it was a fairly simple one.

When Julie arrived home she informed me that my granddaughter Ashleigh had survived the last cut and was now officially a member of her high school’s varsity volleyball team. What’s more, the team was playing in its first tournament the next day, Saturday, and naturally they would be expecting some homemade cookies from Grandpa Kevin. Thus, after Julie went to bed that night, I stayed awake to whip up a batch of peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies. Actually, all I whipped up was the batter. The cookies hold their shapes better if you let the batter rest in the refrigerator overnight. So I didn’t bake the cookies until the next morning, just a short time before we left for the tournament, which began at 8:00 a.m., and was being held at Del Oro High School in Loomis. The weekend was young and already I had completed two small baking projects: tortillas and cookies.

At the volleyball tournament, my stepdaughter Mary Ann informed me that she would be hosting a going-away party for my granddaughter Christina that evening. Christina had enrolled in a college in Southern California and was all set to move downstate later in the week. Christina is twenty-one years old and has lived at home with her parents her entire life, so this was an exciting change for her. To celebrate, her mother decided that her Aunt Mary Ann ought to throw a party for her that evening. Mary Ann asked me if I could bake two cakes for the party. I said I would. But the annual Paper and Postcard Show was being held that weekend at the Scottish Rite Temple in Sacramento and my wife and I usually spend a good part of both Saturday and Sunday at the temple whenever the show is in town (Julie collects postcards commemorating old ocean liners, but that is a subject for a later essay). Because we intended to visit the postcard show directly after the end of the volleyball tournament, I would have little time to bake my cakes before the beginning of the going-away party at six-thirty.

When the volleyball tournament ended, we raced off to the Scottish Rite Temple, where Julie spent several hours perusing old ocean liner memorabilia (she also collects menus, passenger lists, and other ephemera from the days when great passenger ships like the Mauritania and the Normandie still plied the waves). I bided my time looking for postcards commemorating some of my favorite writers (I purchased a Robert Burns postcard, a Robert Louis Stevenson postcard, and a few others.) The great thing about collecting old postcards is that they are relatively cheap. The cards we purchased last weekend cost ten bucks on average. We can’t afford to collect first-edition books from the early 20th century, or original paintings from that era. But vintage postcards rarely put much of a dent in our wallets.

At three-thirty I was back home and ready to do some more baking. When I bake a cake for some special occasion, I refuse to use a mix that comes in a box. I take great pride in my baked goods and always whip them up from scratch. For Christina’s first cake, I decided to make a Pocono Mountains Crème Cake, which I had baked several times before with great success. I got the recipe from a collection of prize-winning cake recipes from America’s State Fairs. The book has one cake recipe for each of the fifty U.S. states. The Pocono Mountains Cake was a prizewinner at the Pennsylvania State Fair some years ago. It is not an easy cake to make. The cake alone requires fifteen ingredients, and the frosting another five. But I managed to whip up the batter and get it into the oven in about a half hour. After that, I had to hand wash all of the implements — measuring cups, measuring spoons, spatulas, mixing bowls, etc – that I had used on the first cake before I could begin the second cake. Actually, I assigned this task to Julie. She balked at first, because she was busy putting her new postcards into her ocean liner album. But I insisted that if I was going to do all the baking, she had to do all the cleaning up.

For my birthday, a week earlier, Julie had given me a cookbook called “Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes.” It was filled challenging cake recipes that called out to my inner dessert chef. After flipping through the book’s pages, I decided to attempt the sour cream-chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and chocolate-peanut butter glaze. It’s always a bit scary whenever you begin baking from a new cookbook whose author you know nothing about. A lot of cookbooks are poorly put together, the recipes in them full of omissions and improper instructions. If you are going to make a cake from a new cookbook, it is wise not to begin it at the last minute. If it turns out that the cookbook’s author is an incompetent idiot, you may end up with nothing to show for your efforts but a dirty kitchen. So I began this cake with great trepidation. If it failed, I would show up at Christina’s going-away party with just one cake, which wouldn’t be sufficient to feed all of the guests. What’s more, this was another challenging recipe. It required the preparation of not just a cake, but of both a homemade frosting and a homemade glaze to pour over the frosting. As I put together the cake batter I began to fear that perhaps the cookbook’s authors, Alisa Huntsman and Peter Wynne, were not the baking experts the dust jacket claimed they were. The batter, which included a cup of sour cream, a cup of vegetable oil, one and a half cups of water, two tablespoons of distilled white vinegar, two eggs, and a teaspoon of vanilla extract, seemed way too runny even before I added the water to it. I called Julie away from her ocean liners and asked if I ought to add only half of the water that the recipe called for. She insisted that I stick to the recipe and just see what would happen. That way we would know if we could trust the cookbook in the future. So I poured in the water and produced a batter that was as thin as hot chocolate. It looked as if it would never harden into an actual cake, no matter how long I left it in the oven. I slipped the three cake pans full of watery batter into the oven, set the timer for thirty-five minutes, and then crossed my fingers.

Miraculously, when I opened the oven thirty-five minutes later, I found that the batter in all three cake pans had been transformed into a light, fluffy, and perfect layer of cake. These were extremely moist cake layers, to be sure, but they held together perfectly. I let them cool and then I frosted and glazed them and took them to the party where they were a big hit with the guests, even more popular than my beloved Pocono Mountains Cake. By the end of the day Saturday, my weekend baking projects included eight tortillas, two dozen peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies, two three layer-cakes, two homemade frostings, and a homemade cake glaze.

On Sundays, Julie and I often make what we call a Taylor’s feast, because generally the best part of it (the fish, or meat, or other protein) is purchased at Taylor’s Market on Freeport Boulevard, which is close to our home. Usually Julie is the one who whips together our Taylor’s feasts, to reward me for having made dinner the other six days of the week. But last weekend, I decided I wanted to play a role in the feast-making. I found a recipe for hushpuppies in a Cook’s Illustrated magazine and decided to whip up a batch of these treats as a pre-feast appetizer. What’s more, in the same magazine I found a recipe for a dessert called a “midnight cake.” This looked like an extremely easy cake to make, and I thought it might be a relief to whip up a quick and easy cake for Sunday night’s dessert after having baked two relatively challenging cakes on Saturday. For her part, Julie made an incredibly tasty concoction of grilled seafood served on a bed of rice and topped with a cilantro-mint salsa. By the end of the day on Sunday, I was pretty much all gourmet-ed out. And suddenly I wasn’t looking forward all that eagerly to the baking I would have to do on Monday in order to contribute to the Happy Tails bake sale.

Monday was a hectic day for me. I had a busy schedule which precluded me from even starting my baking until after dinner. And, feeling tired and lazy, I didn’t actually begin the baking until after I had spent an hour in front of the television with Julie, watching old episodes of “Will & Grace” that we had rented from NetFlix. Not until Julie went to bed at 9:30 p.m. did I finally begin my baking. And as soon as I did, I realized that I was out of unsweetened cocoa powder. So I lost twenty minutes making a run to Raley’s to pick up the cocoa powder and a few other possible necessities. When I returned from Raley’s I began putting together another incarnation of that easy “midnight cake” whose recipe I had discovered in Cook’s Illustrated. The recipe calls for only seven ingredients. This convenience is attained by using mayonnaise (which contains oil and eggs) rather than oil and eggs. To make it, you combine two cups of all-purpose flour, a quarter cup of unsweetened cocoa powder, and two teaspoons of baking soda in one bowl. In another you mix together one cup of mayo, one cup of sugar, and one teaspoon of vanilla extract. Then you put a third of the dry ingredients into the wet mixture and stir it together. Next pour in a half cup of water and stir again. Then another third of the dry ingredients and more stirring. Then one more half cup of water and more stirring. And finally the last third of the dry ingredients and one final stir. At that point you grease and flour a 9×13 inch cake pan and pour the batter into it. Bake it at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean (don’t forget to preheat the oven). When the cake comes out and cools off a bit, you can sprinkle powdered sugar on top of it, if you like (an eighth ingredient). Alas, because it was late and I was in a hurry, I sprinkled on the powdered sugar right away. This turned out to be a mistake. While the cake cooled a bit, I whipped up some cookie batter, which I then place inside the refrigerator so that it could cool overnight.

When the cookie batter was done, I began cutting up my midnight cake into twelve slices. I put these slices on paper plates, and then I inserted each slice into a large ziplock bag along with a plastic fork. I didn’t seal the bags because I feared the warmth of the cake would create moisture inside the bag that would cause the slices to grow soggy overnight. After all twelve slices were plated and bagged, I set them aside for the night.

I awoke early this morning to bake my cookies and to seal the cake slices. But while my cookies were baking, I retrieved the cake slices only to discover that the powdered sugar on top of them had grown a bit soggy overnight, causing it to take on an unappetizing yellowish tint. I was going to throw the slices out and take only the cookies to the bake sale, but I tasted one slice of cake and found it so delicious I didn’t have the heart to throw it out. Instead I removed the remaining slices from their bags and applied another layer of powdered sugar to the tops of them. Then I had to slip the slices back into their bags very carefully so as not to scrape off the second later of powdered sugar. The woman running the bake sale insisted that the major ingredients of each individual item be labeled, so that the purchasers would know what they were buying. I didn’t want to call my cake a “chocolate mayonnaise cake” because I thought that might turn off potential customers. So I wrote up a dozen individual labels that said “Chocolate Cake Topped With Powdered Sugar.” I stuck these to the interior of the ziplock bags and then sealed up the bags. When the cookies were done I wrote up two-dozen labels that said “Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies” and then prepared another two dozen ziplock bags.

The bake sale was held just outside the north entrance of the State Capital Building, and it began at 7:30 this morning. Because of all my missteps and setbacks, I didn’t arrive at the Capital until about 9:00 a.m. At that hour, it was impossible to find a parking space anywhere near the site of sale. I had to park two blocks away and make two separate trips with an armload of baked goods. By the time I had finally dropped off all of my cookies and cake slices, I was fairly sick of baking. I only hope those darn cats at Happy Tails appreciate all the hard work I did for them last night and early this morning.

At any rate, my final tally for the last four days is: eight flour tortillas, four dozen peanut-butter chocolate chip cookies, two dozen hushpuppies, two three-layer cakes, two sheet cakes, two frostings, and one glaze. I think I might take a break from baking for a while.

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