My Mom turned 87 on the 19th of March, still in the hospital, creeping
ever so slowly
towards death. We decided to have a small celebration, considering that
we thought she wasn't going be here by this point. My Mom was a great
cook before she decided to hang up those apron strings, "I'm too old",
but her cakes were second to none. In light of many bedside
conversations about the "old" days when she baked cakes for church
functions and her lady prayer partners, she spoke of her Springtime
Chiffon Cake as being one of her favourite cakes, and it certainly is
one of mine. So I dragged out my handy dandy Kitchen Aid stand mixer,
and made her the cake, a light, 3-tiered lemony concoction, filled with
lemon curd and frosted with an ethereal mixture of whipped cream and
some more lemon curd, and a blanket of shredded coconut. It is a divine
cake. My first mistake was in the choice of baking pans. It needs to be
baked in an ungreased angel pan, which I didn't have. I have a non-stick
pan, which if you grease, then flour, gives the eggy batter
something to cling to. However, try to invert that after baking so that
you keep the height, and you will have a disaster. So I cooled the
thing in the pan, which resulted in a flattened cake with a waist line
where it collapsed. Undaunted, I made the lemon curd, and of course for
whatever reason, I could not find the instructions. I remembered the
"decrease" by 1/2" pertaining to water, so that's what I did, decreased
the water from 2 cups to 1 cup, and after it was cool and congealed,
found the recipe, which said to decrease the water by 1/2 cup. Out with
the boiling water, and the hand blender, but then I had a runnier curd
that wouldn't firm up the same way as if I had added the correct amount
of water in the first place. When I folded the required amount into the
whipped cream, it was a bit soft, but no matter. I filled, frosted, and
coconut-ed the cake, and other than being a a bit vertically challenged,
it looked beautiful. The cream icing sagged
a wee bit,
but it nicely settled into the waist, where the cake would settle on
me. I took it and a bottle of the wine my Mom has been drinking for
years, unopened, from her fridge, to the hospital. I figured we really
needed to celebrate. We even had an extra guest, the lady in the bed
next door, on the other side of the curtain. She was no bother, really.
She was dead.
After a swig of the Banrock Station non-oaked
Chardonnay, my Mom decided it wasn't her wine. I showed her the bottle,
of course partook of it myself, but, "I don't care what it says on the
bottle, it's not my wine." Okay. Then for the cake. "This isn't like my
cake." Well, anything of hers that I have ever tried to make is never
100% like hers. For one thing, she frequently tweaked recipes, and would
neglect, not on purpose, to tell me about the tweaks. However, being a
veteran cake baker, I knew her changes to this one. So, wanting to hear
what I hadn't done, I asked.
"It's not chocolate."
And so the Hurricane blows on, sometimes a Category 5, other times just a tropical storm. Bless her little 87 year old heart.
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