The Cake Life

When I showed up on my neighbor's back porch this morning, looking for a #80 tip so that I could pipe chrysanthemum petals on my girlfriend's birthday cake, she said, "You're just in time!"

"It's the other cake lady," said Jim, and he and Ann welcomed me in to see and taste the latest experiments.

"I'm quitting my job," Ann told me. "I'm thinking of turning Abbey's bedroom into a baking room, and I'm going to quit my job and do one wedding cake a week."

That's fine for her. She has the personality trait one needs for cakes, a trait I lack: patience. I can blame everything that's wrong with my life on that character flaw. It's a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

I spent my entire Friday baking. I should have stuck my head in the oven instead. Don't get me wrong: I usually love helping my kitchen to sound like a kitchen should, with whipping and beating and all kinds of verbs, noisy and sometimes violent. It reminds me of my grandmother's kitchen. She was messier and noisier than I, with onion skins in a clear bag on the counter and liver grinding and things boiling over on the stove and mixers whirring.

Baking is altogether different from cooking. Oh, give me a houseful of company, and I can serve them salmon chowder and mustard and rosemary-encrusted pork chops, Brussels sprouts with garlic and butter, and rich, mashed cauliflower as creamy as potatoes. You can hide a multitude of sins with a sauce and a garnish and a fancy plate and some wine. It's dessert that jangles my nerves and unsteadies my hands.

I tasted Ann's test cakes—one from The Cake Bible, which we both decided wasn't very good, and another from a Southern-style cookbook. I tried an amaretto buttercream that was too cold to be tasty but too yellow for her needs. Frankly, I am the better baker. She is neat and patient, though, and you would choose one of her cakes over one of mine based on their appearance.

Ann followed me back to my messy kitchen to test my meringue buttercream and the fudgy chocolate frosting. She tasted with a thoughtful expression, as if she were rolling it all around on her tongue to pinpoint every ingredient. "Good," she said. "Very good."

She gave me a few ideas for covering up my less-than-smooth buttercream, which was a little too sticky to finish with parchment, and then we compared ways to make a basket weave. I showed her the stroke I gleaned from an episode of Martha Stewart, and she showed me what she learned at the Cake Cottage (I took the same class but missed that night). In far less time, Ann made a perfect basket weave. She took the extra second to prepare the pastry bag, twist up the end, feel the weight of it in her hand. When she squeezed, the frosting was released in a uniform strip; nothing splurted; no icing oozed up out of the top of the bag. Next to hers, my basket looked as though it had been nibbled by rodents.

Before she left, Ann told me about another pattern—one I'd never tried—that would be easy, even for me. I didn't practice it first; I just went for it.

Frosting does not, alas, cover many sins; it is a sin itself. So when you make a mistake, it's easy to make several worse mistakes on top of the first. This is my specialty. Though the Cornelli lace looked OK as it was, I couldn't leave almost-well- enough alone. So I piped an unpracticed chrysanthemum in the center, the #80 tip jamming several times and leaving sloppy spurts of malformed petal on my would-have-been-beautiful-if-I- had-taken-my-time birthday cake.

I wouldn't have made this cake at all had I not decided, in a panic, that my two cocoa buttercream cakes would not be enough to serve 35 people. And so at 5:30 this morning, I found myself standing in the same spot in front of the Kitchen Aid mixer, where I had stood from 11:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m. yesterday, baking layers of cakes and wiping my hands on my clothes. (At dinnertime, I made good on my promise, despite my exhaustion, that my daughter could help me make chocolate chip cookies.)

And now it is 2:00 on Saturday. The cakes, all three of them, are rotating from countertop to fridge (I only have room for two). My kitchen is clean and peaceful. Rain has been falling since yesterday, remnants of tropical storm Ernesto, and the air is crisp as an apple. The house smells sweet. I remember my grandmother at the end of a long day of cooking for a holiday, the crumbs of her sourcream apple cake swept up, the dishes put away, leftovers divied up and doled out and sorted by the front door. My most vivid memories of her are from the back, as she took each step in slow motion, her spine crooked and hunched over, her shoes and apron off. I can still hear how she moaned with pleasure when she sat down, at long last, on the edge of her bed.

I know what you mean, Grammy.