How do I explain my mother’s chocolate chip cake?
I could tell you how every bite pulls me to memories from each year of my life. That when I press it to the top of my mouth I am standing simultaneously in every moment that I have ever done that exact thing. How I can feel the sweet summer air and the coldest winter nights as I touch it to my lips. Or how I can feel my mother standing behind me as I make it, conspiring with me to save a little batter to spatula directly into our mouths.
I could tell you that I still take a big gulp of milk after I eat a slice, and use the sleeve of my shirt to wipe off the ensuing milk mustache. Because a part of me is still an eight year old boy, and the world can still be full of wonder.
I could tell you that I still see the walls of the hospital room where she died sometimes when I close my eyes. Pink and white. Shiny with inoffensive sterility. The room always felt empty to me, even at the end, when it was littered with hundreds of flowers, cards, people. I can’t help but cringe as I type out the saccharine truth: the cake fills every inch of that emptiness.
The wedding cake wasn’t always going to be this cake, but once it was, it didn’t make sense to do anything else. There are practical reasons why – I successfully made the 2 layer beast at the top of this post in under 2 hours of total labor, and early testing showed it retaining a moist and delicious cake-y-ness for a full week when properly refrigerated.
It also happens to be the only true “family recipe” that I am in possession of. Family recipes run so counter to the way that I think of cooking and food at the moment – I really only get excited about new recipes from well respected chefs, or flights of fancy that I dream up. I tend to view old family recipe books as historical documents or jumping off points for new recipe ideas. (A recently found recipe for Lo Mein in my Grandmother’s recipe card box recommended placing spaghetti noodles in an oven to attain the desired brown color for the noodles.) Ok, I’m a bit of a food snob, but there is something larger; I’m not precious with my cooking – regardless of how well a dish comes out I am on to the next thing to try immediately. Preserving my recipes for later (let alone future generations) feels silly.
And yet this recipe beguiles me after even the thousandth cake. As opposed to literally every other recipe I use, I don’t make any alterations at all – why mess with perfection? I still haven’t found a cake that is more wholly satisfying of an eating experience – it has the pleasant heaviness of a corn bread, but retains a spongy springiness of a classic yellow cake as you bite into it. The shaved chocolate adds a really excellent dark sweetness at the back of your tongue that accents the wonderfully moist buttery vanilla partying at the front of it.
There are details to iron out – I’d like the cake to be a bit prettier overall. I also removed the chocolate chips in the original recipe in favor of chocolate icing in between layers, a decision that I am not certain of. There are still months to go and I have made great progress in these 6 attempts. But I feel like we’ve crossed a threshold now: I’m going to make this cake for our wedding and I feel happy and safe about that.
I can’t believe that I’m getting married. I still feel like a kid so often – evening eating this cake I always feel like I’m stealing a piece because I haven’t asked permission (or waited until after dinner so I don’t spoil my meal). The fourteen years that have gone by since Hanna left us feel impossibly short and incredibly long at the same time – my life is so completely different now than it was then. For years I was paralyzed – the fear of leaving Rochester, of leaving my connections to her, somehow being a betrayal of my love for her. Instead as I grow and change I feel her presence more than ever. I know truly in my heart how much she would love Leslie – She would love Leslie’s strength, independence, and smarts, and treasure how Leslie cares for me, protects me, picks me up when I fall.
There was some time when we didn’t make this cake, after Hanna died. When we tried, my dad and I agreed that despite the fact that we had followed the instructions to a T and exactly as we remembered Hanna doing it, it was coming out overly dry and not nearly springy enough. At the time we blamed it on our missing Hanna, but I now believe it was because we were over mixing the batter. There was a lot that I used to blame on Hanna passing – but so much that I am grateful for has happened since she left us that it grows hard to blame her death for anything. The person that I am today is shaped by both my mother’s life and my mother’s death, for better and worse.
I’ve been pestering my dad recently with many questions about my mom, and about us, and about being young and starting a family and the future and on and on. My mind has been on this family and life I’m about to take part in, and how I can plan, and what I can do to get ready. My dad laughs at me.
“Eli, all of this wasn’t in any of my plans for us.” He says. And we smile, because there’s nothing else you can do, really, and we have been blessed with years of Hanna’s life, and we are blessed with her memory now, and we are blessed to be together and to have found people who care for us. We are lucky.
The cake also teaches me not to take myself to seriously – this great delicacy that I hold in such high regard is made from Duncan Hines and Jell-O mixes, after all. Sometimes when I get frustrated that I don’t have the time to get out to the obscure butcher in Bushwick to get the kind of smoked sausage that would really accent this dish perfectly I think of this cake and smile and think of how the most wonderful things can come from unexpected places.
Elsie's Chocolate Chip Cake
Ingredients
1 Package, Duncan Hines Yellow cake mix
1 Package, Jell-O Vanilla Instant Pudding
1/3 cup, Vegetable Oil
1 cup, Water
4 Eggs
1 12 oz. Bag, Chocolate Chips
1 bar, German sweet chocolate, grated
Procedure
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter two 8×8 pans or one 9×13 pan.
- Mix cake mix, vanilla pudding pkg, oil, water, and eggs together with a wisk, stopping when the batter is smooth. Do Not over-mix.
- Fold the bag of chocolate chips and half the grated chocolate into the batter. Mix gently until thoroughly combined.
- Bake 40 minutes for 8×8 pans, 35 minutes for 9×13. (Check to make sure the cake is done by inserting a knife in center. If the knife comes out clean, the cake is done.) Let the cake cool for a while- but while the cake is still warm, sprinkle other half of grated chocolate over top of the cake.