Well, if this isn’t proof that I shouldn’t watch Food Network at night, nothing is. Here’s my question for the week…
What’s your favorite food from your childhood, the one that brings up warm/fun/loving memories?
This one is super easy for me. Caramel cake. Every year for my birthday, my Bopum (for the uninitiated, that’s my grandmother) would make me white or yellow cake with homemade caramel icing. And every year, she’d claim the icing wasn’t right. And every year, I’d eat it and think it was the best thing ever.
To be honest, she could have stacked bricks and iced them, and it wouldn’t have made a difference to me. It was the caramel I was after. Most of the time, I ate around the edges, getting just enough cake to support that wonderful, sugary sweet caramel. And after that first day, we usually just took spoons and scraped any remaining cake clean.
There was not a single year my Bopum failed to make me caramel cake. When I got married and moved to Michigan and my dad drove up for Thanksgiving, she sent cake with him. Come hell, high water, or random moves, Jodie would have her caramel cake!
Easter 2009 was my last caramel cake. Oh, I got one for my 2008 birthday, but she was visiting us in Georgia at Easter and decided to make me one, because she had made one for my brother’s birthday the week before and he had taunted me about it on the phone in front of her. That was more than my heart could bear, so she baked that cake and I taunted him right back.
Less than three months later, she was gone. To be honest, I think she knew that Easter was her last chance to make me one, because it was the first time she taught me how to do it. I haven’t had the heart to try, because it just isn’t the same if I do it myself, but I’ll tell you what… Bopum’s caramel cake equals butter, sugar, and full-fat-whipping-cream love, one hundred percent.
–JB
Jessica R. ptch says
YUMMY!!
I was and still am a pasta girl! My mom always made Beef n Noodles which I loved. Still do!
My grandma used to make me a German Choc cake for my birthday. It was wonderful. After I got married and did grocery shopping for myself, I discovered the frosting in a can.
I called my mom and told her about it. She laughed and said, “What? You thought your grandma made that cake from scratch?”
Yes, yes I did.
Jodie says
Oh man! That cracked me up. Were you shattered? Or were you just stupid excited that you could now eat the icing straight out of the can any time you wanted? 🙂
Kaye Dacus says
My great-grandmother’s plain cake (pound cake)—warm with butter on it.
I have the recipe, but it just doesn’t taste the same when I make it. I think it has something to do with how well her Bundt pan was “seasoned.” Somehow, a Teflon pan just doesn’t imbue the same flavor. 😉
Jodie says
There is just something about grandmother’s and cake, I guess. I’d love to be able to make icing her way, but it’s impossible. I really do think love makes a difference.