Remember that one of your children won’t eat buttercream icing and one won’t eat cream cheese icing and one will eat only the layers and leave every morsel of icing absolutely untouched, a giant F-shaped slice of butter and cream. On his plate it’s the Second Coming, but only the cake is raptured, leaving behind a skeleton of powdered sugar sin.
The no-icing kid prefers the brown sugar pound cake, remember, not the cream cheese pound cake or the sour cream pound cake. Remember that your grandmother’s recipe for brown sugar pound cake is on a card labeled “Caramel Pound Cake” though there is not a hint of caramel in it. Remember how your grandmother always said “caramel” as though it rhymed with “carousel.” Remember when your grandmother’s handwriting was sure and strong and she could still see to copy out a receipt, as she sometimes called it, and remember when she was too weak and blind to bake but still knew the receipt for care-a-mel cake by heart.
Remember that the card is tucked into your mother’s recipe box between the card for cranberry Jell-O mold and the card for brandied fruit. Wonder for the first time why she filed a cake recipe between two fruit recipes (or, really, two “fruit” recipes) until it finally comes to you: this must be the Thanksgiving section of the recipe box. There was always some taxonomy behind your mother’s inscrutable systems, and her brown sugar pound cake recipe would of course be grouped with the squash soufflé and the pecan pie, too, because it goes without saying that there will be no pumpkin pie recipe in any Thanksgiving file created by your mother, who spent her childhood harvesting pecans in Lower Alabama.
When you pull out the eggs and the butter and the flour—plain, not self-rising; you will never make that mistake again—and the absurd quantities of sugar, remember to set the recipe card in a safe place. There are things you cannot keep safe, that you have already failed forever to keep safe, but you must remember to protect this one card written in your grandmother’s hand and saved in your mother’s recipe box. There’s a child in your house who won’t eat icing, and today is his birthday, and he will not always be a child, and you will not always keep him safe.