My Mother and the Cake Mix

By Veronica

My mother came to visit me for the birth of my daughter, turning my home upside down for a week and then happily flying away.

When my mother visits, several things are certain. First, our butter will be soft, and rather than slicing a pat from the end, she will scrape her knife on the middle of the stick, gradually carving into the butter until it resembles a saddle in its concavity. Second, I will not be able to find anything for several weeks, my home having been organized according to her whims. Third, I will discover strange food squirreled away in unexpected corners my kitchen.

This post is about that last one.

My parents have a retiree’s love of Sam’s Club and Cosco. Any time I visit them I can be certain that we will have at least one trip to a gargantuan warehouse-style store, perhaps to buy groceries or just to have lunch. While there, they may pick up a gallon-jar of sweet pickles. You never know. When they visit me, these foods magically appear, without comment or explanation, and I will eventually find myself standing in my kitchen, wondering how we could possibly eat a half-gallon of Kraft Thousand Island salad dressing before it expires.

So after the birth if my daughter a month ago, I knew a certain amount of culinary detritus would be left in my mother’s wake. Sure enough, in the cupboard where we keep our canned goods, we found a package of instant chili (just add water and tomato paste!). I am particularly taken with the name of this product.

Nothing says quality like the inappropriate use of quotation marks.

We also found two boxes of cake mix. I have eaten far too many frozen burritos since becoming a parent to have any pretensions of food snobbery, but I generally prefer the taste of my own cakes from scratch (and believe me, after reading Megan’s post from yesterday, I feel a little guilty admitting that). But one of the cake mixes was chocolate, and chocolate covers a multitude of sins.

That’s in the Bible. Keep looking. You’ll find it.

We made the chocolate cake and enjoyed it. The other cake mix, however, was a strawberry cake. A super-fake-tasting, artificial strawberry cake. The kind of flavor canned drinks just call “pink”. I shuddered just looking at it, but I know children have a different sense of taste entirely, so I called my four-year-old and my three-year-old into the kitchen to help me make this cake. They loved the mixing and the pouring and the baking, and they have been slowly eating the cake all week. Az and I won’t even taste it. The smell is enough, especially since, to frost this wonderful cake, my mother obligingly left this:

Mmm. Cough-syrup-flavored frosting. Yum.

But though I would not eat this particular cake unless someone paid me (in cash –  up-front), I see in the scattered packages of un-asked for food, the love of a mother who is still trying to take care of her girl, even after she’s all grown up. And that tastes even better than homemade.

It turns out that love is pink-flavored.

Veronica Mitchell blogs at Toddled Dredge.