Cake #50: "Clean Sweep" Cake
With the bright summer sunbeams glinting off lakes, bicycle fenders, and lawnmowers here in sunny southwest Minneapolis, life is as sparkly as can be. But sparkles and glints are not just a summer phenomenon in this neighborhood; even during the all-too-many dark-and-under-piles-of-snow months, surfaces shine and glowâat least in Carla and my little bungalow and thanks to the dedication and efforts of our friend Donna, who helps us keep things tidy and as cat fur-free as possible, given the omnipresence of resident felines Fleur Simone and Nigel Dapper Longstockings. That's certainly worth cake, and lots of it, which is why Donna is the recipient of the golden anniversary cake of the "This Cake's for You!" project, cake number fifty.
Donna has been a quiet but keenly feltâand fully appreciatedâpresence in our itty-bitty home for some years now. Without her, we'd be in a big messâliterally. She's patiently cleaned around piles of many, many things that have been stacked up and added to and not moved for many, many months, only to be replaced by piles of much of the same things, with a few extractions and another few novel additions, moved just a few inches away from the originals. She's got a knack for knowing what cleaning elixers will take out which strange and unidentifiable sitcky spots, and just how much scrubbing power is needed to accomplishe the feats before her. She's offered to clean our oven, without any prompting whatsoever. She's funny, wrote us a sweet note when Nigel finally drummed up the courage to brave the vaccuum cleaner and say hello to her for the first time, and lugs quite a bit of professional-looking equipment up and down the front steps, lickedy split and nearly never breaking out in a sweat. In short, she puts up with us. And she's unfailingly supportive; with every room we finally spruce up with paint, or make more liveable with carpeting or art, or simply tidy up on our own before she arrives, she says encouraging things like, "The house is coming along!" and "Things are looking so nice," which makes us feel that home ownership isn't such a pteryodactyl an albatross after all, but might actually be someting of a satisfying and creative and nurturing end in itself.Â
So what sort of cake to make for Donna? The cake had to be fresh and invigorating, that I knew, just like Donnaâand just the way that Donna makes our house feel when she's come and gone. I also thought that, given all the lugging and lifting and traipsing from house to house that she does, she might appreciate a cake that would slice easily and, once wrapped in wax paper or tucked into a baggie, could simply slip into a pocket and be on hand for a snacking emergency. With all this in mind, along with the hunch that Donna would likely appreciate a bit of chocolate somehow worked into the cake, I settled on an orange sour-cream and chocolate-chip pound cake. So apt to be thrilling and generous of flavor! So likely to bake up golden and glowing in honor of its being the fiftieth cake in the "This Cake's for You!" project! So unlikely to be any kind of problem at all, especially with respect to any threat of falling and turning into a sinkhole before my very eyes! Right? Right, right, and wrong. Big wrong.
Perhaps fittingly, given that none of the other forty-nine cakes have failed completely; or perhaps due to some chemical shenanigans between the baking powder, baking soda, and sour cream; or perhaps due to the fact that I attempted to turn the pan in the oven at some critical moment when the top of the cake was heading up, up, up but only half-heartedly and undecidedly; or perhaps due to all three, the cake fellâreally, really fellâwhile it had twenty minutes left to bakeâand it never rose again. In fact, it fell even more once I took the pan out of the oven, whimpered just a little, and slid it onto the cooling rack. Although fragrant and glowing, this cake was a lost cause. The only thing to do, it seemed, was to hum the cake a durge and pledge to try, try again. After all, Donna never gives up in the face of our mess! So who was I to give up? What I needed was a clean sweep, a second attempt, and the faith that wholeness can following collapse, if I would just keep at it.
And so that's what I did. I made another, with all the creamining, and zesting, and folding in of minichocolate chips, and multiple peeks into the oven, and hands off until the timer went off, and granting of five extra minutes of baking for good measure, and muttering of very quiet hoorahs upon removal from the oven, and a little holding of the breath as the cake sunk a teeny, tiny tad as it began to cool, and a grand exhale when stability settled in and it looked like the cake was a keeper. Phew. The only tricky maneuver left was the mixing of the sour-cream icing, which came off without a hitch, probably because I had made sure to have extra confectioners sugar and sour cream on hand as backup.
Since Donna is sort of lke a ninja, she mostly comes and goes without my seeing her, and so I'll leave her boxed-up cake on the table for her to discover, take home, and enjoy as a chocolate-chip-covered token of Carla and my sincerest appreciation.
A few lessons from cake #50:
You can't always know what makes something turn out not so well, which likely means that you can't always know what makes something turn out well in the end; the most one can do is to try, sit tight, try again, and ask for help if the result is a mess that's too much for you to handle all by your lonesome.
You don't have to know someone well to have them be an intimate part of your life and for you to be tremendously, fantastically grateful for the slender and not-so-slender threads that hold you together.
Too many interior-dwelling minichocolate chips may be as big a downfall to a pound cake as leveaner-acid shenanigans and pan jiggling.