I am not demanding when it comes to gifts. My list (when I go to the trouble to make one) can be summed up as practical, verging on boring. For some time now, I have been dropping hints to my family that I wanted a cake platter and dome—and not sly, subversive hints. In fact, lately they have been something more akin to, “Hey honey, look at this cake dome. It’s on sale for $12.99. It sure would be nice to have that for Christmas.” Seems like a simple, straightforward request—apparently not.
Maybe the hubby thought he was doing my rear-end a favor since, once I have a cake platter, I will be compelled to bake something to go on it, and then I will be compelled to eat it. Whatever the reason—and I suspect the only reason has been lack of effort—up until a few weeks ago, I still had no cake platter. But I do, now!
I returned home from my annual Bunco Christmas party not with a ridiculous white-elephant gift destined to collect dust on a shelf until next year, but with a mighty fine, shiny, glass cake platter and dome. That was a Sunday night. Monday and Tuesday were spent sifting through recipes to decide what cake should christen the new platter. The possibilities were overwhelming. There was always the new bundt pan to consider, sitting on the shelf itching to be baked in. In the end, however, I went for the two-layer poppy seed cake with lemon curd icing. After all, our lemon tree had yielded an abundant harvest this winter. So, of course, the cake had to have lemons. Never mind the fact that I didn’t have two eight-inch cake pans. Let nothing stand in my way. After a few unsuccessful calls to my neighbors, I was stuck using my one nine-inch cake pan, and my one nine-inch spring-form pan. So what if one was dark and one was light (I now know this boils down to different baking times), and sure the cake would be vertically less grand than it should be. Not about to be deterred now, I plowed on.
Despite the mismatched pans, the cake turned out beautiful, and it looked marvelous atop the new platter, so I was thrilled to share it with my neighbors that Wednesday evening. Everyone raved. Nobody even noticed that one layer was slightly more well done than the other. Fortunately, no one was in any danger of a surprise drug test, because the quantity of poppy seeds would have guaranteed a failure. And that was only using two-thirds of the amount called for.
The recipe had also required six egg yolks. Not wanting to waste the whites (normally this somewhat pinchy tendency is seen in someone who has survived the Depression—ruling that out, it must be the repressed German in me), I naturally put them in the fridge until I could think of a use for them. Hopefully it wouldn’t involve some other dish that I did not yet possess. At first I thought I’d make a lemon meringue pie. Kill two birds with one stone, egg whites and lemons. And then I remembered my grandmother’s chocolate chip meringue cookies, aka “forgotten cookies.” My sister Amy had the recipe. I called her. She couldn’t find it. Call Mom. Five minutes later I had the recipe in hand—but no time to make the cookies. Thus, the whites sat peacefully in the fridge for a few days. Family members were warned not to throw them away. Would they go bad? I assured myself that no they would not, or at least no more so than the whole eggs sitting next to them still in their shells.
A few days later, with only three million other things to do, I set out to make the cookies. The recipe called for two egg whites, two cups of sugar, vanilla, one cup of pecans, and a bag of chocolate chips. I had six egg whites. No problem, just triple it. Christmas was only a few days away; they would make great gifts. Mind you this meant using six cups of sugar as well, three cups of pecans, and three bags of chocolate chips! I decided that the sugar probably couldn’t be skimped on. It was bound to be crucial to the structure, but I drew the line at three cups of pecans and three bags of chips—that would get darned expensive. Never did I consider using only part of the egg whites. Nothing gets wasted around here.
