I don’t like the title of this post. It’s the first thing that came to mind, but it makes this all about me and it’s not. My attempt to bake this amazing cake of my aunt’s for the second time either proves that I’m a perfectionist at heart or a glutton for punishment. This was to celebrate my mother’s birthday – a bit of a milestone that I won’t publish here – and I carried the ingredients across three states, through the flooded farmlands of the Midwest to put it together. And there again, it sounds like more than it is – I didn’t hike across those three swampy states with the rations strapped to my back. I threw them into a grocery bag and tossed them into the trunk and then drove along slightly above the posted speed limits for five hours while listening to a toddler who likes to yell in small, confined spaces.
But my mother and I gather around the dessert table each year following the Thanksgiving Day feast and we map out our slices of carrot cake and pecan pie for later. And then we help ourselves to a slice of this cake, and the fact that it is our first choice from a sea of decadent delectables each year says a lot about this cake.
This time it stayed together and was anything but lopsided. We would have eaten it regardless, and enjoyed it in any form, but in the end, when I’m baking for my mother, for my aunt, I like it to be just perfect. And perfectly delicious it was.