Learning to cook

Ahhh, the holidays have finally arrived with the fun of cooking, baking and cleaning. Well okay, skip the cleaning, – that never even made it to my long list of favorite things to do, but baking – now that is another story.
A couple years after my husband laid inexpensive tile in our first kitchen, I wore the design off the square of tile in front of the counter. That’s the spot where I stood making the weekly loaves of bread, pies, cakes and cookies.
My sisters and I began cooking the year our youngest brother entered kindergarten and our mother found a job. Before she left for work each day, she left us a list of instructions for preparing the evening meal. The family developed steel stomachs as we developed expertise in a repertoire of recipes. The only thing that everyone refused to eat was the soapy tasting Johnny Cake with the golden brown crust caused by using baking soda instead of baking powder. One experience with soapy cornbread should have been sufficient – but each sister made the mistake at least once. I still double check recipes before adding the leavening agent.
We did learn and even began to experiment, especially with desserts. We began decorating the cakes we made from mixes. The first cake mix we prepared without our mother around was one that we made for my mother’s birthday. We told her she should go to the barn and talk with Dad for a while. She put on her jacket and left saying said something like, “don’t forget to grease the pan.” How did she know what we were going to do with that cake mix we had set out on the counter?
Learning to bake as a child in a large family meant that even if the food wasn’t perfect, everything disappeared quickly – except, of course, the soapy tasting Johnny Cake – which has never been totally consumed by man or beast.
My mother was proud of everything we did, including the fact that we decorated cakes – sort of. Our initial ventures, without a pastry tube, consisted of widely distributing, one drop each, of red, blue, green, and yellow food coloring on white frosting and swirling the colors in a feathery pattern. We thought it looked great, like real decorating – until my aunt began decorating cakes for weddings and showers. Suddenly our rainbow swirls were not quite enough.
We saw an ad on the back of a box of confectioner’s sugar, for a cake decorating kit, taped the money to a piece of cardboard and sent off for it. It came stuffed in a plain cardboard box – a white tube with six yellow tips.
Suddenly, plain ordinary cake mixes were served with irregularly shaped loops and fallen rosettes. We studied the ideas for cutting flat cakes to reform into wobbly, legged dogs and collapsing houses covered with crumb laden frosting
We reached our epitome in cake decorating the time we made identical cakes for my father and his twin brother, my uncle, The initial plans called for two Mickey Mouse cakes with cupcakes for ears until my mother said, “What is that saying? … Are you a man or a mouse?”
We made men.
Someone snapped a shot of me proudly holding the wooden cutting board covered with aluminum foil with the lop-sided duet of icing faces on round cakes.
With the help of all the nephews and nieces, my father and uncle ate up their cakes in short order … and why not, they were fool proof cake mixes, not soap flavored Johnny Cake.