My mother was not Donna Reed or Jane Wyatt. What’s worse, in an era when father knew best, she was a single mother. To support us, she trained race horses. Since none of them ever won, we moved a lot. The two constants through all of this shifting and moving were my mother’s stews and spice cakes. In both cases, she was proud of never having used a recipe. In the case of the stews, memory tells me she could have used a cookbook. The cakes were a different story.
Although they looked like no other cake I’ve ever seen – for some unknown reason, she baked them in metal ice cube trays rather then cake pans – their taste haunts me to this day. They were a wonderful mixture of exotic spices, sugar, and ordinary flour cooked into light golden brown loafs. I enjoyed these odd concoctions in private, but was not happy with them in public, whenever they showed up in my school lunch. Luckily, I was never at any school long enough to really be embarrassed by them.
Mother's Day is in one week. Are you prepared? Skip the flowers and the gift certificates, and make Mom a beautiful breakfast that she won't forget.
My late grandmother, may she rest in peace, was very, very good at the things she was good at, and spectacularly bad at the thing she was bad at, which was cooking.
About a month ago, I shared a recipe for buttery shortbread. In a cooking class I taught recently at my local natural foods co-op, we made the same shortbread, only rather than using 1/2 cup cake flour as my original recipe instructed, we used brown rice flour. It gave the shortbread a much creamier, more tender consistency. It was delicious. I thought it couldn't get any better.