I never wanted a birthday cake as a kid unless Juliette Lewis was going to be jumping out of it. It was the era of “Natural Born Killers” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape”, and like anyone else with great taste in bad girls, I had a giant crush on her. Aside from that unlikely exception, though, I wasn’t that into cake. My mom would take requests for my birthday and I’d ask for, like, a cherry pie, or a chocolate trifle, or Turkish delight - yes, I have filed this into evidence that my sister was right, I was intolerable. I didn’t hate cake, I just thought it was kind of plain. Lately, though, the plainest cakes seem to be the Juliettes of my desire. There were about two weeks, recently, when all I thought about was a four-egg cake, unfrosted. I was walking around in a warm, vanilla-scented daze until I realized the only way out was to just bake the damn cake, so I got out all of the ingredients to find I only had two eggs. Luckily, The Joy of Cooking also has a recipe for One-Egg Cake, bless their frugal hearts. The batter mixed, I then learned that I don’t own a cake pan, so, into the cast iron skillet it went - all of this only adding to the appeal of its girl-next-door plainness.
The other day, I walked into a bakery I’d never been to, on a back road of a town I’d never been to - Apple Valley Bakery in Monmouth, Maine (best molasses cookie I’ve ever had) - and I was welcomed with the familiar smell of a baking cake. I remember being so glad that I wasn’t a bear, whose meticulous nose would pick the scent apart into elemental butter, sugar, flour, egg, vanilla, and never experience the totality that the lowly, human nose inhales as one, singular, alchemical perfume: cake.
In the spirit of not picking things apart, I’ll share a poem I wrote about my cakes this week, which you can also hear, read aloud, by pressing play at the top of the page, and then I’ll let cakes speak for themselves by way of a few recipes.
Plain Cakes
A one-egg cake, unfrosted
a boxed chocolate cake, chocolate frosted
and a molasses cookie, thick as a stack of junk-mail, but full of good news, fantastically chewy, I chewed it the whole ride home from the backroad bakery, which was two hours and even that wasn’t long enough.
I’ve eaten all of those plain cakes in just the last few days
I guess it was one of those weeks
where I’m watching my figure
grow
around itself
like a tree, swallowing the lumps of it’s fallen limbs.
The kinds of cakes you mix in big bowls, sleeves rolled up
Summer camp sized sheet pans
Eaten on paper plates, napkins, out of hand
while standing in the sand by the lake with friends
waiting for the grown-ups to show up and say
Enough sugar
but they never come
and you don’t even wipe the crumbs from your face
when you dive into the full volume of your cold water sugar buzz.
This memory comes to you
on your thirty-seventh birthday
on the bank of a river, fishing
as you reach into your breast pocket
for your square of plain cake, wrapped in napkin
sweet as all the time gone by
no one there to wipe the sugar from your mouth
smiling.
This recipe for Dark Spice Cake, written originally by my great-grandmother, and adapted, by necessity, by me, is an interesting example of how the perception of “plain” all depends on where you’re standing. I imagine she thought of this as a very simple cake because she had all of these ingredients on hand all the time, whereas, given my lifestyle and geography, I have a different suite of staple ingredients in my pantry, so I adapted her recipe into what was simplest for me. I bet hers was also adapted from a previous generation’s simplest cake and I wonder what that might’ve looked like, and what about the generation before? This lead me to thinking about food knowledge travelling hand to mouth down ancestral lineages, and since I, personally, don’t have a strong familial or cultural food heritage, I usually end up leaning into place - where am I, rather than who am I, which often end up sweetly intertwined. I wondered what the original cake of this place might’ve been, which I probably could’ve googled and gotten an answer but it was more fun to let my minds eye look around the place, where I found acorns, blueberries, maple syrup, fire, maybe a hot stone… smells like pancakes to me. It made me happy to think that one of the oldest plain cakes is still a favorite of today. Here is a link to my recipe for Acorn Pancakes, where you can easily sub in whole wheat or buckwheat flour in place of acorn flour since most people don’t have that on hand, but I bet you’ve got some blueberries in the freezer begging to be used.
The new space in your freezer after using up those berries will come just in time to fill it with rhubarb, which should be making mouths pucker any day now. I’ve been counting down all winter to the day I’ll finally be able to make this Rhubarb Cake I’ve been fawning over in “Rage Baking —The Transformative Power of Flour, Butter and Women’s Voices” (Tiller Press, Simon & Schuster) by Maine culinary treasure, Kathy Gunst, and Katherine Alford. Kathy is a James Beard award winning food journalist and beloved resident chef of NPR’s show, Here and Now. See more simple, seasonal recipes from Kathy and learn more about her work HERE . She was generous enough to let me share the coveted Rhubarb Cake with you all here:
One of the biggest appeals here is that it only takes an hour, start to finish. I’m making it the second the rhubarb reaches like eight inches, and then I’m gonna try it again with Japanese Knotweed in place of rhubarb because finding new ways to use knotweed in bulk is an ongoing public service project - I’ll report back with results.
In the meantime - it’s lovely cake baking weather, and it’s my birthday on Monday, so bake one in my honor, bake one for earth day, bake one and eat it, cross-legged and grinning, under a bush like Johnny Cash, bake an extra for a neighbor or just eat two, like Helen Rosner, one of my favorite journalists says
“You should treat yourself as well as you would treat anyone else”
Easier said than done, I know, but eating cake is a simple way to start.
If you’re enjoying Appetites, like I am, give me the best birthday treat and consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which will make a significant difference in my quality of life and my ability to make this a quality experience for you for just $5/month what a bargain! Or if you’re already a paid subscriber (I LOVE YOU), maybe share Appetites this week with someone else who might like some cake. XO
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