I am not a baker.
At least this is what my sister Maya
would tell you.
Maya maintains that she is the baker
in the family and always will be. We have had arguments about this. And by arguments I mean fights. Maya and I grew up together and have lived together almost
all of our adult lives. Despite the almost three-year difference in our ages,
we are so close that we’ve developed the kind of unspoken communication that
twins seem to share. I can often hear the thoughts in her head and, likewise,
she will start laughing before I’ve finished a joke. But this doesn’t mean we
don’t have fundamental differences. In fact, the best explanation of how Maya
and I differ can be found in our relationship to the TV game show, Jeopardy!, long a mainstay in our home.
Maya was a contestant on Jeopardy!; I
was a clue on Jeopardy!. I wouldn’t
even make it past the preliminary round of testing to get on that show as a
contestant and Maya couldn’t conceive of being a clue. Nor would she want to
be—being a contestant requires much more
skill. I supply the frill and the glam, but Maya knows everything. And this is where the Great Baking Debate comes
in.
“I never said you weren’t a good cake
decorator,” she sniffed at me once. “You are very good at that. But I will always know more about baking
than you do.” The subtext (not that
one was needed): “You are a Janey-come-lately and have no business calling yourself
a baker.”
It is true that Maya has spent more
years baking than I have and that she started much earlier. She even worked in
a bakery for a few months before we moved (along with my then year-old son)
from the depths of a basement apartment in Portland, Oregon (yes, I said basement and Portland in the same sentence; it was a festival of darkness, mold
and misery and drunks rolling into bedroom windows) to beautiful North San
Diego County. In those days, she crawled out of her underground waterbed (yes,
Maya was a staunch waterbed defender well into the ‘90s) in the dark wee hours
and biked through downtown Portland streets to the bakery where she learned
things about leavening and dough that she didn’t already know from her year
making pizza in Peppy’s, our family’s short-lived pizzeria. To this day, “I worked in a bakery” is one of her
go-to I-know-more-than-you conversation stoppers. Note: I worked beside her the
entire time at Peppy’s but the only thing I baked during that time was the bun
in my own oven.
And, to give credit where it is due,
it was Maya, not I, who was the family cake-and-cinnamon-roll-maker for many
years. I should mention here that my family has, generally speaking, rather
pedestrian tastes when it comes to food. They do not like frills and glam (my
specialties, you’ll recall) when it comes to what’s on their plates. Vanilla,
chocolate, and strawberry constitute their version of variety. In the year my
family lived in Hollywood, California, we went to Baskin-Robbins weekly. My father
chose the same flavor ice cream (Jamoca Almond Fudge) every single time. This
is a man, after all, who considers fruit and/or nuts in salads or main courses
an abomination. Once, upon biting into a slice of carrot cake I’d made, he
commented, “I see you’ve used one of your exotic ingredients again. What do you
call this?”
“You mean the raisins, Dad? Yes, I’ve
really gone off the deep end.”
They are a tough crowd, at least for
me. Maya, however, has never had a problem with cooking or baking the same three
(okay, five) items over and over again; chocolate cake, white cake,
cinnamon rolls, cupca…zzzzzzz. While I find these stupefyingly boring, Maya
doesn’t mind making them at all. She likes the ease of a familiar dish. But I
can’t do or make the same thing over and over again. It is torturous for me.
Repetition causes despair. This is the reason why I’ve not (yet, anyway) been
able to write novels with a series character or even, to the frustration of
some agents and editors, stick to one genre. Sameness does not equal comfort
for me. I like uniqueness, a challenge, a new idea, and the drama that comes
with the it took so long to bake it and
I’ll never have that recipe again kind of thing. It’s almost impossible to
create dramatic, unusual food for people who are looking for a slice of cake
that reminds them of Entenmann’s or a frozen slice of Sara Lee pound cake. As
Maya has often said to me, “Know your audience.” And if your audience is the
type to become unsettled by nuts and raisins there isn’t much room for
experimentation.
All of which has meant that, for many
years, I shucked off the cooking and baking duties and left them to Maya. For a
long time, Maya made dinner for the family every Tuesday night (the same three
meals, much to my father’s delight) and was the go-to birthday cake baker. As
such, she basked in the appreciation that comes with the consumption of
tried-and-true home-cooked comfort. One of my son’s happiest birthday memories
involves a cake that Maya made for him. He was turning 14 and wanted to have
his birthday on the beach with the entire family and a “rainbow cake” as the
centerpiece. “Can you do that?” he asked Maya. “Can you make a rainbow cake?”
Maya said that she could and made a white cake with white frosting and pastel rainbow
swirls on top. Happy as a clam, he ate his rainbow cake on the beach with his
aunts, uncle, mother, and grandparents and then went for a stroll to the
waterline where he gazed out on the ocean. At the time, I was finishing up Raising Blaze, the memoir I was writing
about him. The photo I took of him at that rainbow-cake-happy moment ended up
as the cover.
For all these reasons, I was content
to let Maya have her place as the family baker. After all, as she likes
pointing out, “You don’t even like cake.”
This is true—to an extent. In the Team Cake vs. Team Pie throw-down, I’m almost
always on the side of Team Pie, but only because I usually find most cakes and
frostings overly sweet and cloying. And
like most women, I have a complicated relationship with sweets of all kinds.
They taste good, they are sometimes supremely comforting, and they make one
gain weight. There isn’t much of a way around the last fact, sadly. I can resist cake is what it comes down to
(though most of the time; in the interest of complete honesty, there isn’t a
Mardi Gras King Cake that is safe from me).
So why is there even a question, let
alone an argument, about which one of us can claim supremacy in this area?
Because, as it turns out, I am a baker. More specifically, I am a
creator—someone who looks at landscapes or scorpions or…books, wonders how they can be reimagined and consumed as cake and
then actually makes them. It is true that Maya has been at it longer, but in the
last few years I have made up for lost time. I am now the
person in my family who makes the birthday cakes, special event cakes, and
anytime-I-just-feel-like-eating cakes. Almost always, these cakes (and pies)
are themed. My artist mother got a “painted” cake with a still life,
paintbrush, and canvas all made out of marzipan and hand painted. My son got a
green tea and raspberry cake covered with algorithms when he passed his algebra
class. Even Maya, a musician, got a
birthday cake covered with chocolate notes and topped with an edible Bach
score.
How did this happen? How did I go
from being a writer who was largely disinterested in what I now know is the
alchemy of cake to a writer who had the temerity to make a wedding cake?
Well, there was a man.
There was also a terrible year (an annus horribilus, as Queen Elizabeth II
once referred to it) that stretched into two terrible years, during which
almost every part of my life fell apart like a badly constructed pastry.
But these were external forces
nudging me into the kitchen. On a deeper level, I turned to baking because I
wanted to make something beautiful and because I wanted to be able to take a
problem and solve it. Each set of ingredients, recipe, and cake design presents
its own puzzle or problem that needs to be thought through, executed, and
solved. Life problems require the same process but are so rarely solved as
quickly and deliciously as those involving a Bundt pan and butter. Every cake
I’ve made in the last few years represents a triumph, however small. Even those
that didn’t turn out as well had their own lessons to impart. And on some
level, this passion for confection has been with me since childhood; way before
even Maya put on an apron.
Not too long ago, I went rifling
through my files and memory boxes in search of a photograph. While I couldn’t
find the picture I was looking for, I did discover a drawing I’d made (and,
miraculously, kept) when I was about eleven years old. Made with all the colors
in my set of Magic Markers, the drawing is titled, “Desserts” and is of every
cake I could imagine. There is a wedding cake topped with what looks like a
chef’s toque, a pound cake marked with a “100,” a devil’s food cake topped with
red horns, and an extremely tall almond cake with thick green frosting among
several others. There are Xs in different colors next to each cake and as I
looked at the drawing, I remembered why. I’d surveyed all the members of my
family who could speak (two siblings were pre-verbal babies then) and asked
them what their favorite cakes were. Each cake was marked accordingly.
Anticipating a dismissive scoff, I
didn’t bother telling Maya about this find. I did, however, show it to G—the
man who was the catalyst for my journey into baking and who has been my
strongest supporter (read: eater) as I have progressed through it. G looked at
my drawing, smiled, and shook his head.
“You see?” he said. “I always knew
you were a baker.”
