Caroline is the editor-in-chief of Literary Mama, the associate director of The Sustainable Arts Foundation, and co-editor of The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage as well as Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
I really didn’t intend to write about cake again, but some weeks around here seem to occasion lots of baking and this was one of them: birthday cake for Tony, four batches of cookies for various events and finally, a delicious almond layer cake with sherry-lemon buttercream, just because. Just because my mother sent me the recipe, saying “Doesn’t this look good?” Just because my parents were visiting. Just because I like to try out new recipes when I have extra people around to eat the results.
It’s a delicious cake, best (I think) with a sprinkle of raspberries and three generations around the table to share it.
We are the new parents of a fussy, fabulous eight-week old baby. Tony heads off to work, as usual, at 5 AM so that he can put in close to the minimum ten hours his start-up expects before coming home to take a crying baby off my hands.
I’ve spent the day with that crying baby in my hands, nursing and walking laps around the house, occasionally sitting down for a minute to email one-handed with my Stanford writing students, who are working on their final essays with me while I’m on “maternity leave.”
We order in take-out from the local Chinese place and I sit on the couch in a stupor, eating bites out of the carton and watching a rerun of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” while Tony, holding Ben in one hand (the classic colic “football hold”) and a fork in the other, circles from living room to dining room, swooping over my shoulder occasionally to grab a bite of dinner himself. During commercials, I mute the TV for a moment and Tony pauses and I wish him a happy birthday, drowned out by Ben’s wails. I have no recollection of whether I bought or made a cake (I must have, I think, but I really don’t know) but I definitely remember feigning optimism. “It won’t always be like this!”
Today:
We have two boys who, happily, don’t cry nearly as much, but they still have their various impacts on birthday dinner. Today, for example, Ben has a 5:30 baseball game at which Tony is coaching. Since it’s a school night, and because my parents will be arriving, jet lagged, from the east coast at 3 this afternoon, we can’t really hold dinner until after the game. So we’ll eat in stages: Ben before his game; Eli, my parents and I during; and Tony after. But we will all sit down together, after school and before baseball, for a piece of birthday cake. This cake, which is our all-time favorite birthday cake.
I read a restaurant review recently that mentioned the unusual egg dishes on the dinner menu and the waiter’s shrugging comment, “Chef thinks eggs are not used enough in the evening.”
Well. Perhaps Chef does not live with children who think Breakfast for Dinner is as wonderful a treat as Dessert for Dinner.
However, I do think eggs are not used enough in the afternoon. There’s not much quicker than what I fixed the other day when I faced that yawning gap between lunch and dinner. And by the way? That fork’s a lie because I just picked the whole thing up and ate it in my fingers.
I have to admit, as much as I adore my children, and as good as they are at eating out, it’s rare that Tony and I eat dinner alone at a restaurant and I think, “I wish the kids were here!”
But that’s exactly what I thought when Tony and I first ate at Zero Zero, a pizza and cocktail place in downtown San Francisco, and I saw their mix-and-match dessert menu. You pick a base (ricotta donut, warm chocolate cake, or sticky toffee pudding), you pick an ice cream (chocolate, vanilla, or swirl); and then you pick from the glorious toppings: hot fudge; chocolate bacon bark; olive oil and sea salt; vanilla poached cherries; chocolate-orange-hazelnut shell. It appealed to me, but I knew it would really delight the kids, and I’d been trying to think of a way to get them to this dessert ever since.
The problem is that neither of the boys really likes pizza, and I am too cheap to spend $10 a plate on the plain pasta they would likely order as an alternative. I considered taking them for brunch, but couldn’t imagine letting them order dessert after an order of deep fried French toast with caramel bananas. You see my dilemma. I bided my time, hoping the right opportunity would arise eventually.
It took a few years, but recently the planets aligned just right. Friends of the boys had slept over, and the kids had all enjoyed their typical breakfast followed (after some LEGO spy games) by a big waffle and fresh fruit brunch. Then we all headed downtown to the California Historical Society’s exhibit on the Golden Gate Bridge (which you really shouldn’t miss). We went over to Yerba Buena Gardens afterward to run around, walk through the MLK, Jr. Memorial, and climb trees.
The boys’ friends went on home with their parents at that point, and we found ourselves downtown in the late afternoon, a bit hungry, not ready to head home yet. I remembered Zero Zero. “Salads and dessert?” I suggested to Tony. And off we went.
The boys read peacefully while Tony and I had cocktails.
We all ordered salads: Caesar for Eli and Tony; mixed greens with shaved artichokes, fennel, green olives and herbs for Ben and me:
And after that, felt free to go to town with the dessert menu. First Ben:
Ben's menu choices
And then Eli: Eli's all-chocolate dessert selection
They ate happily, of course:
At various points along the way, our plan could have gone awry: the restaurant might have been closed, or crowded, or the kids not interested in salad, or unable, after the busy day, to sit and make salad a good meal. But the planets aligned for us in that way, too, and our time at the restaurant just capped off a lovely, rare day, so I didn’t even mind when I asked Eli to share a bite and he laughed and answered like this:
I remember so vividly helping my dad lay out his orchard. I was around ten years old, and my dad hadn’t entirely finished clearing the area, so we both had to tramp through lots of briar and brambles. Dad positioned me where he wanted the first tree and gave me the end of a spool of twine to hold; then he paced off thirty or forty steps in a line, unspooling the twine as he went. After he marked the spots for each tree, he dug the holes and planted the trees, staked and fenced them, and then we watered each one, hauling buckets of water over from the swampy area that’s now a pond. There wasn’t any house on my parents’ land yet — nor even a road to the property — just their vision of what this place could be.
Now Ben is the ten year old, and yesterday he and Eli planted their first trees in my parents’ orchard: a nectarine for Ben (the first on the property!) and an apple — one of many varieties here — for Eli.
they dug with a mattockthey dug with a shovel
they checked the depth of the hole they stomped the dirt down around the roots
they staked and fenced each onethey wateredand now we wait
I think back on the day when my dad and I planted this orchard’s first trees and I wonder, was I patient? Did I complain about the heat (or was it cold?), or about the briars, or about the long walk back to the car? I’m sure I didn’t see what my dad saw that day: a clearing in the woods, an orchard asserting itself, children and grandchildren fed from its trees. It’s an easier vision for my kids –- the orchard is established now, as well as the kitchen in the house in which we cook and eat its fruits –- but still, it takes a certain optimism and a certain patience to plant a tree. I’m glad they’ve shared that with my dad.
