My Valentine

By Beck

I am planning on making chocolate cake this weekend – a mocha cake with multiple layers of buttercream frosting. I saw the recipe in a magazine for people with gluten-free diets, and The Baby pointed at the picture – glossy and perfect – and said “Make me this.”

Well, it IS Valentine’s Day this weekend. So I guess I will. And meanwhile, she’s been thinking a lot about that cake, flipping to the page in the magazine and circling it. She’s also written her name a few times on the page, in case I forget who I’m supposed to make this cake for.

There’s nothing terribly profound about baking – it’s just messing around with eggs and butter and flour. I like it and so I do it, but I don’t believe that baking brings any great revelations with it. Although I couldn’t figure out how to make bread for years and years and made, instead, yeasty hockey pucks and finally figuring that out was one of the big triumphant successes of my adult life. (KNEADING MATTERS) So maybe that was a revelation of sorts.

Both of my grandmothers were excllent bakers. My now-dead grandmother – dead for nearly two decades, which startles me to realize, gone for my whole adult life – made fudge and cakes and fancy desserts. My grandmother who I very gratefully still have makes pies and cookies, rhubarb pies and gingersnaps. My mother deftly makes biscuits and thumbprint cookies and banana cake with thick chocolate frosting. And she and her sisters talk wistfully about the yeast rolls that their grandmother made, wrapped in a clean tea cloth and carried to their house for Sunday night supper. And though my great-grandmother’s life was good and long and well-lived, you could see that my mother would love to lift the cloth again, to have that sweet warm smell of yeast and the work of hands rise up to her.

And I am going to make my Baby a chocolate cake.

I don’t think of history and love and hands that time wore out while I’m creaming the butter and sugar. I think of flour and vanilla and eggs, I think grease the cakepan and preheat the oven. And then it’s icing sugar and cocoa powder and where’s the narrow spatula and then my kids eat thick slices of chocolate cake with a cup of milk beside them. And so do I because, hey – chocolate cake.

Someday, if everything goes well, my children will be very very old, with children of their own and grandchildren and probably even a few great-granchildren scampering around, given how very long both sides of their family tend to live. And maybe my child, who will have lived, I hope, a good and a long life, will turn the pages of a magazine and see a chocolate cake and remember a long-ago Valentine’s Day, and remember their mom again, and remember that she loved them. Butter and sugar and eggs.