Birthday Season

Dear Bread Fans,

We are in birthday season: mine, my husband’s, my uncle’s and many of his family’s, Ember and Azure’s, my brother’s, and a whole herd of our friends. All of us are spring fever babies, made as seeds took cues from the warming soil and started to grow. No wonder we have plenty of ideas!

Despite the wretched news and realities of America and the world, we’ve made cakes and blown out candles. We’ve felt joy, and love for our dear ones.

On my birthday, friends trudged through the snowstorm to make me waffles -- bringing homemade maple syrup and chocolate sauce. Toasted walnuts too. The feeling echoed how I felt saluted growing up. Birthday mornings, we came downstairs to a special place setting, a placemat, plate and bowl, a cloth napkin under the silverware, a blue goblet for juice. A handmade card and some of our favorite dolls and stuffed animals propped up, smiling/not smiling in the way they always did, comforting us with their very presence.

The inanimate creatures had custody of our care, and my mom knew this. She saw how we loved them – for me it was Owl and Betsy and Annie, and Leander the puppet – and she brought them to the table for the first celebrations of our birthdays. What tenderness! I’m ever grateful for Eve Francesca Sweeney Halloran and the firm foundation she provided.

The flip side of that coin is the perpetual learning pains of seeing so many people do not have this baseline, and in the current reign of ICE, are receiving the opposite. I struggle to write this letter because there is no balancing the levity of celebrations with the burden of knowing the antithesis of care is predominating in the government, and at so many other levels.

BUT, I will tell you about some leavening I witnessed. Ember wanted to bake his birthday cake with me. On an earlier baking date, he identified THE CAKE, a birthday cake in Olia Hercules’ Mamushka cookbook.

And so, we did. This cake has no baking powder, only eggs to create and elevate the structure. There’s a meringue topping, and ice cream and strawberry filling. Into my trusty Kitchen Aid mixer, we cracked 5 eggs – they seemed gigantic, like they were extra, extra large. Maybe their size was amplified by my awe that another child in my circumference is getting older. How do all these kids climb up time?

We set up the eggs and sugar with the beater and let them spin at high speed for six or seven minutes. Maybe it was nine or ten. The eggs and sugar spun into the future and we ignored them. Ember cut strawberries. I buttered two round pans. When I finally looked, I couldn’t believe how lofty the mixture was! The bowl was full of a pale yellow cloud of eggy sugar, sugary eggs, ready for a fold of salt and flour.

Now, you may not know why this excites me so much. You may wonder why it deserves a full paragraph. I will tell you.

· Because I adore baking powder, and its history in America, and what it’s meant to women baking.

· Because when I discovered that Eben Norton Horsford, the man who holds the patent for baking powder in America, when I learned that his papers were at the RPI archives, just down the street from where I live, I felt like I was floating down Tenth Street, the street where I live, the ribbon between me and that library.

Remembering this feeling, I notice I am placing it elsewhere. I am putting that floating on Avenue A, the street where I grew up. A skip of my brain is associating that lofting with earlier times, when I was twelve or thirteen, sneaks slapping the asphalt on a street so small and semi-rural that it didn’t have and would never get sidewalks. I have merged this recent memory of discovering my proximity to the remnants of Mr. Baking Powder with another buoyancy, an excitement I cannot recall.

I like that I blend my childhood sense of rightness with my adult sense of rightness. Both times the street was catching my steps and giving me certainty. Reflecting my certainty.

I cannot fit all my thoughts about baking powder right here. (Maybe that’s a book.) Suffice to say that the fact that this cake Ember and I made did not have any and still it rose, in a human impression of the sky and the clouds, in earthly regard. And that makes me hover a little, flutter above my worries for the world.

I hope that this snapshot of a baking moment, of a cake that carried us into the gleam in a child’s eye reflecting all our promises, gives you something you need. I hope that you are finding moments you need and friends who need hugs and who are in the custody of your care.

If you, dear readers, were near, I’d want you in the custody of mine. And I’d have a slice of cake waiting – leavened with eggs or baking powder or a volcano of vinegar and baking soda. I’d give you a puff of love.

Amy