Cake

My mother, although an excellent cook, never baked. She left that to her Swedish mother, Anna, who lived with my grandfather in an apartment my father built for them over our garage in Weston, Connecticut. Anna, as I’ve written before, was a gifted baker, especially when it came to Swedish breads. I can’t remember when my mother suggested I might make my father’s birthday cake. Or why the task had been handed down to me. I was only nine or ten, but my mother was well aware that I loved to watch Anna bake, and that my curiosity needed constant nourishment. Rural Weston had no bakery in its small-town center, nor did neighboring, cosmopolitan Westport. In the 1950s, powdered cake mixes came to Westport’s Gristedes supermarket.