{"id":9157,"date":"2012-03-09T07:06:02","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T13:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/?p=9157"},"modified":"2012-03-09T07:06:02","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T13:06:02","slug":"wiw-she-built-us-cakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/2012\/20120309-9157.htm","title":{"rendered":"Flashback: She built us cakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prompt #10: “What were your birthday cakes like when you were growing up? Were they homemade or store-bought?”<\/b><\/p>\n

We always had two cakes for every birthday–the cake Mom made and the cake Grandma Menter made.<\/p>\n

Mom’s cake was made on the day of our birthday–one of the old family recipes to go along with our favorite meals. Grandma’s Chocolate Cake or Lazy Daisy Cake or Applesauce Cake with Boiled Brown Sugar Frosting. Delicious cakes. Lick your lips cakes. Cakes where the birthday girl felt the specialest for getting to choose her piece first (of course, she picked the one with extra frosting!)<\/p>\n

Those cakes generally looked ordinary, served up in the same pan they were baked in. No fancy furbelows here, just grandly tasty cakes.<\/p>\n

Grandma’s cakes, on the other hand, were take-em-or-leave-em in the taste department. They weren’t bad, they were just ordinary. Cakes baked from cake mixes. White cake or yellow cake or occasionally a confetti cake for good measure.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, we eagerly awaited the semi-annual visits to Bellevue, where a whole counter would be devoted to the cakes. It was always cakes in plural because we always combined all the birthdays for the month into one celebration. January had four cakes. March had three. July had two. October had three. (I’m missing some cousins in there–a September and a November that I can’t remember exactly. Did we smush those two in with the October birthdays? Or did they have their own celebrations?)<\/p>\n

At any rate, when we got to Grandma’s house, a counter (or sometimes the entire kitchen table) would be devoted to the brilliantly shaped and decorated cakes, glorious on their bed of aluminum foil.<\/p>\n\n\n

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