Lila's Chocolate Cake

Before I tell you about the chocolate cake, I have to tell you about Lila.

Lila was my father’s stepmother.  I remember her as funny and blunt (if she thought you were full of shit there was a good chance she’d tell you so – and likely in those exact words) and sometimes difficult and mostly not afraid of anything.  I saw her a lot until I was about six; then my father and his father had a falling out and that was pretty much the end of that.  Until my mother’s mother died when I was 27 and I was standing outside the chapel dreading the rabbi’s call that it was time to go in for the service and a car pulled up under the portico and discharged a classy-looking old lady with a perfect blonde coif and a cane and a pair of sunglasses, and she made her way directly toward me and when she got to about two feet away I realized who she was and blurted out, “ohmygodgrandma” and then collapsed in tears on her shoulder.

She was at the hospital the night Trevor was born (he was her first great-grandchild) and I remember being comforted in labor just knowing she was in the room.  I have a wonderful picture of her holding him at one day old, looking at him like he was the most amazing thing ever to grace the planet (which of course he was).

When I was 32, she came to the end of the cancer thing.  About two weeks before she died, I asked her if she was scared, and she told me she wasn’t.  It had been a good life, she said, and she felt sure she would see my grandfather soon.  She talked about what a wonderful husband and father he’d been, and how much she’d missed him.  On a whim, I asked her if she would do me a favor – if she happened to see my mother’s mother when she got to wherever it was she was going, would she tell her about Trevor?  Her response was to ask me to hand her the phone…which she promptly used to call the mortician and ask him if the traditional Jewish burial garment was allowed to have a pocket.  I never knew for sure, but I think it’s highly likely that she was planning to somehow bring my grandmother a picture of Trevor so they could exclaim together over his wonderfulness.

I wasn’t there when she died (we were in Arkansas with Lisa’s mother, who was also dying of cancer – October of 2005 was a sucky, SUCKY month), but when I went to say goodbye to her a few days before, there was a moment when no one was in the room but the two of us.  She was in and out of consciousness, and a pained look crossed her face.  Do you hurt? I asked her.  She nodded, slowly, and I asked her if she wanted a pain pill.  She shook her head.  I asked if she wanted water, or another blanket, or some hand lotion.  Each time – head shake.  Do you want anything?  I finally asked.  Slow nod.  Deep breath.  Open eyes, looking far far far into mine.

Time, she breathed.

This cake will forever be “Lila’s Chocolate Cake”, capital letters and all.  It’s famous, as well it should be.  My mother makes it, I make it, and I’m sure in a few years Trevor will make it.  It doesn’t look like much – it’s kind of plain looking and flat and not real beautiful.  But it tastes like nothing short of heaven.

Ingredients (cake):

 *2 cups flour

·      *2 cups sugar

·      *1 tsp salt

·      *½ pound butter (yes, you read that right.  I said it tasted like heaven, not like skinny people.)

·      *1 cup water

·      *4 Tbsp powdered cocoa

·      *2 eggs, beaten

·      *½ cup buttermilk (use reduced fat if you must, but really – with all that butter, is it going to matter?)

·      *1 tsp baking soda

·      *1 tsp vanilla

Ingredients (frosting):

·      *1 stick butter (yes, that IS three all together)

·      *6 Tbsp milk

·      *4 Tbsp powdered cocoa

·      *1 box powdered sugar

·      *2 tsp vanilla

You need a jellyroll pan for this cake.  If you have (or can find) one of the “old” ones that’s an inch and half deep, that’s perfect.  Apparently sometime in the last few years, “they” decided jellyroll pans only need to be one inch deep.  That’ll still work, only the cake will be a little messier at the top and you might not fit all the frosting on.  But that’s okay – it just means there’s more to eat right out of the bowl.

Preheat oven to 350°.  Mix flour, sugar, and salt.  Combine butter, water, and cocoa in a saucepan and bring to a gentle boil.  Pour over the dry ingredients and mix well.  Add eggs.  Dissolve baking soda in buttermilk and add; add vanilla.  Mix well and pour into greased jellyroll pan, bake at 350° for 20 minutes.

While cake is baking, combine butter, milk, and cocoa over low heat.  When butter is melted, add the powdered sugar (you can sift it first if you want to be fancy) and the vanilla.  Beat well.  Poke holes in warm cake (that carving fork that you only break out at Thanksgiving works great for this, but a regular fork works too) and pour frosting on.  Allow it to set before cutting it into large pieces, otherwise you’ll have a mess.  If you need it in the evening, bake it after breakfast and it’ll be perfect…just resist the temptation to cut yourself the aforementioned large piece to go with your midmorning coffee.

Guacamole

Guacamole is one of the first things I ever learned to make.  Half an avocado, some lemon juice, chopped tomatoes, garlic salt, and exactly two drops of Tabasco sauce.  Three, if you really wanted to walk on the wild side.  My mother and I would sit down with the bowl between us and watch I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched or That Girl until every scrap was gone.  It was one of my favorite things to eat then, and it still holds a special place in both my heart and my stomach.  Guacamole is like other things – when it’s great, it’s REALLY great…and even when it’s not so great, it’s still pretty good.

This may be, in my opinion, the best guacamole ever.  The recipe’s changed a bit from my childhood, and these days it’s more likely to be Phineas and Ferb than Samantha and Darrin (although we do have the Bewitched box set, and the boys do love it).  When Trevor came to see if he could help make dinner the other night, I seized the opportunity to pass on the family guacamole-making tradition.  I can’t wait to see what he’ll do with the recipe.

Ingredients 

• 2 large Haas avocados (you can easily double or even triple this recipe if you don’t want to hear, “what happened to all the guacamole?!?” five minutes after you’ve finished making it)
• Juice of one lime
• 2 cloves of garlic, pressed
• 1 green onion, green and white parts, chopped fine
• About 5 cherry tomatoes, chopped fine
• Garlic salt (yes, I know it has garlic in it already.  No, you can’t just use regular salt – it won’t taste the same.)
• A spoonful (to taste) of a really good salsa.  We swear by Mrs. Renfro’s medium in our house (in fact, it sends Trevor into paroxysms of joy…“I LOVE this stuff,” he murmurs over the jar, very nearly rolling his eyes and collapsing on the kitchen floor with the ecstasy of it all), but your favorite kind will do. 
• Your favorite tortilla chips for dipping.  Or carrot sticks if you’re being virtuous.  Or both, if you’re doing that angel-on-one-shoulder, devil-on-the-other thing.

Press the garlic into a bowl and add the lime juice and green onion.  Put the avocados on top and mash them (tip that perhaps everyone knows but me – if the avocados aren’t quiiiiiite ripe enough, use the potato masher instead of a fork).  Add the other ingredients and stir well.  Taste and adjust seasonings as needed.  Taste again.  And one more time to be sure it’s all right to feed to other people…

Who, Why, and What

This blog was inspired by several different things.  First, Catherine Newman’s fantastic Dalai Mama, which I adore and read religiously every week.  The writing and the food photography are both gorgeous, and everything I’ve ever made of hers has been good.  I cherish a secret hope to someday be her neighbor and absorb some of her combination of warm hippieness and the occasional Velveeta moment.  She’s a woman after my own heart…check her out here. 

Secondly, my friend Mike’s Gay Gourmet.  Mike is a wonderful human being (even if he is an Aries) and makes the most incredible pasta and red sauce around.  When I was pregnant with our second child, it was the only cure for my all day morning sickness…AND his cream sauce recipe is the only way I will willingly eat mushrooms.  I refuse to make it for myself, partly because I know it will never measure up to the way he makes it, and partly because I’m afraid that if it ever did, I would weigh 400 pounds before I could say gay Jewish Italian man.  Check Mike out, too – here.

The name comes from one of my very best friends, who made the assessment (over cocktails at Vesuvio in San Francisco, but that’s beside the point) that I’d grown “domesticated”.  While to him it sounded like a fate worse than death (the man is perpetually 22 years old – sort of a recently-college-graduated Peter Pan, even though he’s four whole years older than me), it’s come to mean something entirely different to me.  Is life hectic?  Of course.  Stressful?  Check.  Am I occasionally beset by the feeling that I know I have a wife around here somewhere because I vaguely remember what she looks like awake and not focused in 12 other directions?  Absolutely.  But when my eight year old starts a conversation on the way home from school with, “Mama, I have a question…”, or my wife’s amazing blue eyes meet mine knowingly across the chaos of the dinner table, or my two and a half year old falls asleep with his head on my shoulder and his hand in my shirt (he nursed until a week before his second birthday and the boobs still have their magnetic force field thing going), domesticated becomes synonymous with nothing short of pure bliss.  Pure, pure bliss.

So – to sum up: the blog came from a woman in Massachusetts I’ve never met, a gay Jewish Italian Aries, my Peter Pan best friend, my wife with the amazing blue eyes, and my two magical children.  And to them, it is dedicated.