Mothers Day

carrotcake1.jpg 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.

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mothers day cardMy mother's name is Iris, poor thing, and that's only because for the first 18 years of my life every Mother's Day she'd receive the what-I-thought-was-clever "purple flower" in one form or another.  

She straightened me out in college and since then my annual quest to find something unique-enough, classic-enough, interesting-enough for Iris continues.

Got an Iris in your life? Check out this week's Things We Love: A Mother's Day Gift Guide, a tightly edited collection of things we love for mom.