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Showing Original Post only (View all)I Hate Frosting. [View all]
Last edited Sat May 11, 2013, 04:13 PM - Edit history (1)
I hate frosting. Disgusting stuff. I won't eat it. I scrape it off everything.
My mom was that lady who baked a cake from scratch with swirls and drifts of beautiful icing for every occasion. Spice cakes had rich cream cheese icing that she'd whip and she'd whip until it was more like meringue than frosting . German Chocolate, my dad's favorite, was layered with thick chocolate butter cream icing and that candied pecan topping, all made from scratch. She'd stand in front of the stove for half an hour stirring that pecan stuff while it bubbled and popped. You couldn't stop stirring or it would burn. She'd trust me to stir it if she was working on something else but my dad wasn't allowed near it. My dad would be hopping around the kitchen, hoping my mom would look the other way, just so he could steal a hot mouthful out of the saucepan.
My mother took her baking very seriously. If you asked my family over for a picnic my mom showed up with a potato salad big enough for a football team, and a beautiful cake. Well, a MOSTLY beautiful cake. Because they were always square, and they always had one corner that was unfrosted. There it would be, a two or three layer sheet cake, looking like Julia Childs had just spent a day in the kitchen baking something fit for the King of France. Except for that one little unfinished corner that looked sort of like an abandoned lot.
Yes, my Sunset-Magazine Worshipping mother, who strove to make every holiday look like a clipping out of her favorite magazine, would leave one corner of her masterpieces unfrosted, unfinished, and undone. Just so her youngest son, who could be a little bit fussy, got to have a piece of cake just the way he liked it.
I saw the eyebrows raised when people looked at her cakes. I know they thought she might be a little bit nutty. The cakes did look weird. Sort of like a roof with one little patch that had no rooftiles, or a perfect lawn with a little square chunk of just good old dirt. But my mom didn't care. Her kids came first. Sunset Magazine be damned.
That's how much my mom loves me.
Happy Mother's Day Mom. I know I won't see you this year but I hope you liked the flowers.
Call your mama, if you can. If you can't, then send them some good energy and a couple of beautiful thoughts.