Mimi’s Chocolate Cake
Mimi’s Chocolate Cake was my great grandmother’s recipe and THE cake that was made for every birthday. In fact it may have been my great great grandmother’s recipe, but somehow the story changed (AS DID THE RECIPE, wait for it…). The origin was even argued upon a few times, leading up to my mom’s passing.
Family members competed…“Who makes it better?”We are still not sure who did, or does. We are all just happy to just have any version of the cake served to us, at any time. The light chocolate old fashioned dense-ish cake with the very sweet light chocolate sugary frosting was killer.
Did I mention that just a few years ago, somehow my mom and her sister were comparing recipes, and they discovered that my aunt had a different recipe than my mom. And apparently, it was THE recipe.
As it turns out, my mom had the wrong measurements all those years. We aren’t sure if she made some drastic typos on her typewriter or if someone purposely passed on an altered recipe, bur regardless, cake it cake.
Now, all of our cookbooks now have sticky notes and corrections.
I smile every time, when I add more butter than before…and happily, the chocolate, an extra egg white, a half cup more of sugar, the extra teaspoon of vanilla, thinking of my mom all those years doing it her own way.
My kids and I reminisce about how my mom would make the cake each year for their birthdays and how she tended to not have the patience to fully soften the butter or melt the chocolate so there were chunks in the frosting - Chunks of butter, and chunks of chocolate.
Yes, of course it was weird, but it was a comforting-weird and my mom never seemed to notice and I never ever brought myself to mention it.
Because… cake is cake.
I think about the early mornings waking while my girls were still sleeping, I’d wake in the dark morning and turn on the Christmas tree lights. I make the cake every holiday season and it’s also both girls’ birthday seasons, so the tree is always lit by then. In the dark, I cut a sliver of the cake so that nobody really notices, later on.
The silence is broken only by the distant grinding of a passing car, someone heading to the docks for work, or heading home after an overnight working in the factory.
I can sip my steaming coffee and savor it all, easing into the day perfectly, with cake.
