Laundry and Checkerboard Cakes

I know those things don't sound like they have anything in common, but they're the two things I can remember my sister and me doing in a mostly cooperative manner. She might be nearly 3 years younger than I am, but she's long acted as if she were the older sister. And we fought all the time. Our mother once told me that if one of us said "day," the other would say "night." Yet on two occasions, we set aside (most of) the bickering, during our teens, to do something constructive together.

Laundry. Our mother was a stay-at-home mom before the SAHM acronym was even a germ of a concept. Almost everyone's mother was home in those days. Rare was the mother who worked outside the home during the day. And while our mother did try to teach us some domestic skills, I for one resisted the teachings. I hated cleaning my room and I loathed dusting. The only time I willingly dusted was when my sister wrote her name in the dust on my dresser. But there we were one afternoon, home alone, in our mid-teens, thinking we'd surprise our parents by doing the laundry.

Maybe we just didn't follow the directions carefully or maybe there wasn't clear instructions on how to measure the detergent, and I don't recall anything telling us what to do if we used too much, but there we were, in a panic, bailing out the overflowing suds coming out from the toploading washing machine's lid. Good thing our parents found the incident amusing when they got home.

Baking. My paternal grandfather was a baker. He worked for a big kosher baking outfit in Brooklyn that supplied small bakeries in NYC. His specialty was breads, but every week or two, he'd bring us cakes and cookies along with breads and bagels and bialys. And one of my favorite items in those care packages was the checkerboard cakes. The little yellow and chocolate squares fascinated me and one evening, again when we were home alone, my sister and I decided to make one.

We'd baked before, from mixes, making yummy Duncan Hines chocolate cakes topped with creamy Duncan Hines or Pillsbury icing. We'd even managed to make brownies and cupcakes from mixes. So how hard could it be to adapt a mix for chocolate cake and one for yellow cake and make a checkerboard concoction. Damned impossible if you don't have the right equipment, which we not only didn't have, but didn't know we needed. Layering posed enough of a challenge, let alone the jam between the squares. What we ended up with was the messiest marble cake ever created. Tasted pretty good, though. And again, our parents, especially our father, found the whole thing amusing when they got home and saw what we'd been up to. We did have to clean the mess in the kitchen ourselves, however.

My sister has gone on to become rather adept in the kitchen, especially with baking, and her husband is into the culinary arts, too, though neither is an expert. Me? I do make one thing from scratch: chocolate chip cookies. Yum. But for all other baked goods, there's got to be a mix involved somewhere.

Feeling:

memories