love letters to ignatz: yum II

Who says a love affair can't last a lifetime.
It all began with my father bringing home a white box tied with red and white-striped string, filled with fancy doughnuts from the Little Germ Diner. That was what he called it. The Little Germ was a legend in a gritty area of the city where he went to work. He would stop in early in the day to get the best selection. I would laugh every time he said Little Germ and he said it almost every day.

Keeglees, headlights, tailights and half moons perfectly piped with icing were my version of a power breakfast. At age four, my usual morning routine was two cups of coffee, light and sweet with pastries. After the Little Germ's gems were all gone for the week, my custom was to eat half a loaf of toasted Wonder bread dripping with butter before getting on the bus to kindergarten. Once I was so hungry, I ate the whole loaf, dunking the toast into my coffee so the butter swirled on top. Little wonder this kindergartener was rarin' to go. Nutrition, smishin.

Eternally enamored of the curve of frosting spread just so, I later enrolled in a 10-week adult ed class to get a taste of what life could be as a cake decorating diva. The class was small; just a few suburban upper-middle class shop-a-lot-mom-types and a couple alternative, earthier women. Easy breezy, piece of cake. The instructor was a real gal named Ronnie. She showed us her gorgeous cake portfolio, made in the past because her carpal tunnel from squeezing all those icing bags had caught up with her. She was in semi-cake retirement, flew airplanes instead.

Being a former Bisquick queen, I felt professional and happy as a clam as I assembled a collection of those cute little cake tips, kind of like rookie artists talking about brush size as if talent lie in the tool. Standing in the Wilton aisle for hours, debating the prudence of purchasing the whole shebang-in-a-plastic-tote-with-a-clear-lid for a mere $50, I could picture how cool I would look strolling around town with my cake tip tote in hand. Ready for a showdown with any quick-draw frosting slinger that crossed my path, I would stake my claim as mainstream domestic goddess after all.

Cake class quickly morphed into baking bootcamp that would harden the Pillsbury Doughboy. Homework alone surpassed a year's worth of post-grad credit. If you skipped it, you had nothing to do when you were in class. Hours were spent doctoring mixes, diapering pans, baking layers, tinting frosting to just the right assigned shades and storing and transporting it all while keeping it level, always a challenge to me, to class where the actual assemblage took place.

Each week we gathered around a work table in a high school home ec room. Two of the women were already friends who had signed up together, that girl custom. Giggling and fawning over each other's weekly reports about not getting their husbands to do anything, kids' soccer games and parties, things began to deteriorate as daggers were drawn over who made the most perfect cake. Competitive urges surged, a primal kneejerk when women are asked to step up to the proverbial plate or pan. The friends weren't so chatty anymore. They began keeping detailed photo albums, documenting every phase of homework completed at the kitchen table the past week: tight shots of spatulas, up-close and personal frosting-filled tupperwares; no angle or edge to be forgotten in the Duncan Heinz hall of fame.

Other women soon followed suit.
It was enough to make me cry. Mercifully, it was they who started sobbing first.

Seems they perceived their cakes as failures when they didn't measure up in exact syncopation to the instructor's iced styrofoam example. The crying happened for more than one class, serving to solidify my baking friendship with the earthy girl next to me. Of like persuasion, we laughed at our painfully obvious lack of cake correctness and refusal to keep albums to prove we really had tried. We traded stories about desperate measures we were forced to take just to get a couple layers unsinged and whole to class. Often we showed up with layers in pieces, plastered together badly with frosting glue. And forget about crumb coats; my efforts to keep the bad boys at bay resulted in the grittiest frosting you have ever seen, like it had been rolled in chocolate sprinkles by a second grader. Or dropped in dirt.

In my hands the most classic of cakes looked zany, unkempt, a reject. Angles skewed and layers listed so far off, as to endanger the existence of creation entirely. You dared not breathe. If you held your head sideways, it was all good. Symmetry gave way to Sodom or was that Satan.... living hand-held mixer hell. When pale lavender icing was assigned, my bowl throbbed with pimp purple. Betty Crocker meets Goth Girl in a back alley and Betty gets the crap beat out of her.

Thankfully, I didn't own a digital camera back then; they weren't invented. A few fuzzy polaroids of my dog licking the plate is all that remains of my cakes and there is a blessing in that. I'm more of a bundt cake and cupcake gal, anyway.

The final night of class, realizing I had not attained the grail, I shook Ronnie's hand, thanked her for her expertise and patience, and vowed to continue my quest.....armed with paint instead of sugar in tubes, my destiny made clear as a pastry case.