Scripts, Recipes and Banana Bread

I love, love this photograph of my parents. Dad's tie and baby face aside, it's mom's sassy scarf and swingy coat that make it for me. And she's doing this thing that she still does in photos where she tries not to smile. Because her smiles wreath her whole face so that her eyes crinkle and it looks like she's squinting. She really hates that. Dad looks somber because, as a general rule, that's how all the men in his family smile in photos. It's true.


Exhibit A and B: That my brother. He's stoic. And my nephew; he's stoic, too.

I came across the airport photo, taken shortly after my parents were married, a couple years ago when I was looking for some things to put together for my own wedding. And I tried to imagine what it was like for mom to get engaged, plan a wedding, move from a small town in one state to set up house on a farm in another without her mother to assuage any fears and offer guidance. There are moments when I'm overcome by the enormity of what it meant for her to lose her mother so young, because we inherit things, you see. Brown eyes. Wavy hair. Long fingers and toes. And scripts, generations in the writing, explaining who should be loved, how and how much.

I don't know too much about my mom's dad, other than that he owned a filling station, drove a school bus, took his coffee scalding hot and was generally disliked by grandma's family. He always kept a picture of grandma on his bookshelf, though, and when he'd see me looking at it, he'd say "She was a beautiful woman." I remember that, and how he'd pat me on the back and say "That's my girl" when I'd give him a hug and a kiss at the end of a visit. Other than that, grandpa never had much to say, and I’m certain he must have been at a loss when he was left a widower with two barely teenage daughters.

The same way mom was often at a loss with me. I don’t think I was a particularly difficult teenager, just a typical one with the usual sorts of angst, but mom never had the opportunity to be a typical teenager – she was too busy keeping house, going to school and working at this café that I hear tell had the best waffles, which were served with ice cream (!) – to have time for usual angst. So she had to improvise her way through the gaps in an unedited draft of motherhood, and it took us some time to figure things out.

In the meantime, we had some epic battles, many of which took place in the kitchen and several of those over 4-H. Mom, as I’ve said before, is an exacting cook, but I imagine that a young girl suddenly in charge of maintaining a house and feeding her family would have to be. Having a recipe and following it to the letter must have been a lifeline – and offered a small moment of connection to her mom.

That being said, I’ve made a few adaptations to this banana bread recipe, which is one of the first things I remember making entirely on my own.

Banana Nut Bread (courtesy of my mom)

1. Sift:
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt

*I also sifted in two teaspoons of cinnamon; one would probably do just fine, but I’m hooked on the Vietnamese cinnamon from Penzey’s.

2. In a separate bowl, cream:
1/2 cup shortening
1 cup sugar

Then, add 2 eggs, one at a time.

*I used a 1/3 cup of unsalted butter instead of shortening (in general, you need about 1/2 cup butter for every cup of sugar when creaming, so this came together with a little more mess -- i.e. sugar flying out of the bowl -- than usual). I’ve seen a recipe that calls for a 1/4 cup of melted butter to be stirred in at the very end, but I'm not sure how it would affect the texture and structure of the bread, though I recently made a banana bread that didn’t have any butter or shortening and it was wonderful -- so I might try that melted butter thing next time.

3. In a separate bowl, beat:
1 cup bananas (about three)
1/2 cup milk
1 tablespoon vinegar

*I’ve always wondered about the vinegar; I honestly thought it did something particular to the bananas, so I asked mom about it. She said it was supposed to be stirred in with the milk first, to make it more like buttermilk...I just went with straight-up buttermilk; I had it on hand. And I added a generous teaspoon of vanilla, though you could also put in the same amount of dark rum, if you were so inclined.

4. Mix the banana mixture in with the creamed mixture alternately with the flour mixture. Stir until just combined and add in 1/2 cup nuts of your choice. Bake at 325 degrees for 60 minutes.

*I decided to forego the nuts in favor of a 1/2 cup of dark chocolate chips. And I’m not sorry; you won’t be either. In fact, if you’re really feeling crazy, you could add both. I also sprinkled the top of the loaves with some cinnamon sugar before baking.

5. Makes two loaves in smaller pans, but baking time will have to be adjusted accordingly.

P.S. Maybe Yeti would like this version! Nuts are optional.

*I have no doubt Yeti would like this version; she downed an entire loaf the last time I made banana bread, and apparently mom is still amused. While I understand this is part of the danger of having a creature that’s eyelevel with the counters living in your house, I was pretty incensed. I (gently) whapped her on the head with a sock and called her a name that wasn’t very nice, but didn’t involve swear words or taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Once, when my brother and I had pushed mom to the uttermost limits of her patience, she called us a bunch of dorks and deadheads. But I’ll save that treasure for another day, and leave you instead with this lovely, lovely glimpse of spring I found peeking out of my flowerbed last week.

On Cake!

When it came to birthday cake, my brother, at least in my opinion, was at a disadvantage. He was born on St. Patrick's Day, you see, and mom, after assessing the situation overnight, changed his name from Dustin to Patrick and every year thereafter baked him an angle food cake, dyed green, with powdered sugar frosting, also green. This, of course, came after the green sugar cookies and green buns accompanying that day's celebratory lunch at school. He suffered all this with good grace, and claims to still like cake of any color, though now he can have it with green beer. But we don't talk about that around mom.

Green or not, at least he had a birthday cake. Mom, a New Year's baby, rarely had one, unless you count (and I don't) the birthday brownie at Perkins. By the time January 1 rolled around, all members of the family (and probably even the dog) were so sugar sick, having breathed it in and nibbled it in various forms nonstop since Thanksgiving, that even the thought of birthday cake was unappealing. So instead we bundled up and drove to Mitchell for a movie and dinner at Perkins or Godfathers, whichever the birthday girl preferred.

Dad, on the other hand, invariably got a German chocolate cake, sometimes straight up in a 9"x13" pan, sometimes stacked three 8"-round layers high, which, in my opinion, offered the better ratio of tender buttermilk cake to coconut-rich frosting. But since his birthday generally fell right in the thick of achievement days, the kind of cake he got depended on how much time we had, how much mom and I had tried each others' patience and if she had agreed to help with the horticulture judging.

For me, birthday cake, as with most sweets, is really about the ice cream. So other than the My Pretty Pony cake when I was four or five and the horse-shoe-shaped cake presented in the middle of the county horse show (where the first unrequited love of my life Bruce S. was also competing) as a decidedly mortifying surprise to celebrate my 14th birthday, no cakes really stand out.

Except for fudge crème de menthe cake, which, incidentally, happens to have green frosting, too. (And my birthday -- it's on my parents' anniversary. We believe in multitasking our holidays.)

Whatever the cake, though, it was homemade. That, along with the perfect card, was how mom did birthdays. And while I will allow that there are occasions when cake mix can achieve perfection -- hospital coffee cake, for example, or the first cake your husband bakes ever and its for you, on your birthday -- as a general rule, it belongs in the same category as ramen, Doritos and Coke. This is the kind of birthday cake my husband grew up on. White cake, to be exact, with rainbow chip frosting. And he loves it. Raves over it.

I can't make it for him, though. I just can't. It's too easy and without the little bit of extra effort, how can he be assured of my undying affection? Yes. Yes it's true. I am my mother's daughter. So this year I made the cake from scratch, the frosting, too, and added the confetti sprinkles as a nod to J's long-time affair with Betty Crocker.

I'm not condemning cake mix users; I understand that baking isn't everyone's thing, but I love everything about it except the dirty dishes, so you can imagine how immensely gratified I was when my co-worker asked me to make a cake for her father-in-law's birthday.

My mom's go-to cake recipe for everything from brownies to cupcakes is called Good and Moist Chocolate Cake because, obviously, it's good. And moist. I can attest to it.

Here's the recipe (courtesy of my mom):

2 cups sugar
2 ½ cups flour
5 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup hot water
2 eggs, unbeaten
1 cup salad oil (i.e. canola oil)
1 cup buttermilk
1 teaspoon vanilla

Sift together sugar, flour, baking powder, cocoa and salt. Dissolve soda in hot water and add remaining ingredients. Beat two minutes. The batter will be thin. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes.

This cake is pretty much perfect. Light and delicate. The kind of cake you could eat at until you put down your fork in surprise to see that half the pan (or a dozen or so surprise cupcakes) was gone.

I wanted something richer, so I used Orangette's Far From Disaster Cake, which also calls for buttermilk. Only I called it the flattery-will-get-you-everywhere cake because a) I know that my co-worker has a friend who makes wedding cakes and b) it didn't dampen my excitement about the project.

1. I made it in three layers, though it's just as good in a 9"x13". I've heard contradictory things about greasing the sides of cake pans. My mom does, but I don't because I heard or read or somehow acquired the opinion that the cake won't rise as high if the sides of the pan are greased. I should probably figure this out for sure.

2. Before baking.

3. After baking.

4. After layering with ganache.

5. And now, for frosting. My friend requested a light frosting. Cream cheese frosting was too rich; I was afraid to try a meringue frosting for the first time on some dear stranger's birthday lest I give someone food poisoning. I could have done a whipped cream frosting, but instead I asked my cake expert friend Sarah for advice. She recommended a chocolate buttercream with a secret ingredient:

6. Marshmallow creme. She's brilliant, that Sarah.

7. And here, friends, is the charmingly lopsided, imperfectly frosted result. It got a favorable review. And then, when we were planning an engagement part for my kolache-loving coworker, the cake was requested again.

8. Only I decided to dress it up. In fondant. This required more advice from Sarah:

Once your cake is completely cool and each layer is assembled, do a crumb coat (a thin coat of buttercream icing to seal in the crumbs on the cake). This will also allow the fondant to adhere to the cake.

Then, once the crumb coat is set up, I like to do another layer of buttercream that is as smooth as possible as the fondant shows all bumps. Make sure your rolling surface is totally clean and clear, the fondant will pick up
any little grains, etc.

Prepare your surface with shortening and a dusting of corn starch. Roll the fondant to the appropriate thickness (about 1/4 inch). To get the desired circumference, take a ribbon or string and cut it to the height of your cake (go up one side down the other) when you stretch the ribbon out your fondant should be slightly larger than the length of the string. You'll only use one side of the fondant (you won't turn it over like you would with pie crust or pizza dough), but it is a good idea to pick it up throughout the rolling process using your spatula to make sure it is not sticking -- use corn starch as needed.

Once you've got your fondant circle and prepared cake, hold your rolling pin in the center of the fondant circle and drape half over the pin toward yourself. Once you've done this, reverse the process on top of the cake. Gently lay the fondant in the center draping it over the sides. Use your hands or a fondant smoother to smooth the fondant over the top and sides of the cake, massaging down and around. Cut off the excess.

I used this recipe for the fondant. It was a lot easier to make and work with than I expected. Seriously. (Still, the cake took all weekend to assemble. The price of pride, I guess.)

9. I also decided to use a cake leveler. Because let's face it: Lopsided isn't always charming.

10. There it is. Safely out of reach of the roving thief that stalks all things edible in the house. (Can you tell what it is?)

11. The roving thief.

12. It's a cow cake. A cow cake. How about that?

ps -- Here's proof that some things never change, and that my brother and I are definitely from the same gene pool.

1. Circa 1986. Betcha can't tell which one I am.

2. Circa 2002:3. Circa 2005: