I am exhausted.  Drained.  Beat.  Just baked a cake:  Golden Yellow with Fudge Frosting, Grandma’s Fudge Frosting.  It’s the antithesis of a Cordon Bleu creation:  sloppy, uneven, crumbly as hell.  I slapped on the frosting, which was decadently swimming in way too much butter.  It slipped and skidded along the crevices and craters left on my imperfect cake.

Here’s the best part: the secret of all secrets – is that I was thrilled baking this cake, happy stirring its batter, goop flying out in between conversations with Daniela and Jonathan, who watched and helped along the way.  Eggs were cracked and dribbled, flour was stirred and spilled, and somewhere along the line even an entire glass of red wine was dropped and shattered.  But that’s okay.  Wine and glass got cleaned up and a new one poured.  And baking continued, right …Read on

My son has become obsessed with the idea of watching the movie Jaws. He assures me that he is mature enough to handle blood, guts, and whatever else comes his way and seems to be proving that point with the acquisition of extra bruises and cuts received from ordinary boyhood events like tree swinging gone wrong or miscalculating the path of a flying Frisbee made of sharp plastic (we later learned by the gash left under his eye). He is seven.

His seven is not the seven I knew so many years ago. He makes every effort to remind me of how ooold I am. No cable. No cellular. No computer. Gasp. How did the world survive, his curl-ridden head wonders? As for movies, he knows nothing else but Surround Sound, 3-D, and special effects that …Read on

Cheating comes in many shapes and sizes, and in this case, flavors.  Sitting at the dinner table, next to The Professor and The Investor a tiny bead of sweat may begin to form on your brow, not because you can’t keep up with the talk, you are eloquent and intelligent and sophisticated, but because something much worse is about to happen, something that can shatter you but instead fuels you on, something you know no one will notice but you wonder what if they will? (Remember the time you hired the Personal Chef and you could tell right away, yes, you could, she had cheated on her cake.)  You are about to cheat on your gourmand title and are feeling a tad guilty because you know that the Investment Banker and the Professor are both wondering what delicious dessert The …Read on

If I had another child it would be made out of coconut. Because coconut is smooth, and creamy and simply delicious. It wouldn’t talk back or whine or demand to be fed. It wouldn’t wear diapers, strain mortgages, or keep me up at night with worry.

It would be tall and ethereal and covered in meringue fluff. The inside would be a rich, decadent buttercream frosting, and I would play with it, play play play with it on its own clean cake stand. I’d twirl and whirl and smooth and shape, and it would glisten and mold just for me.

My family would deem me nuts. First she names her raw poultry, then her appliances, and now this? It may be too much for them, and they are a forgiving bunch. But they’d see the happiness …Read on

When you are given something called “Friendship Bread,” be wary. It’s not like I was given the actual finished product, I got the dough and a dizzying list of daily instructions with the promise of the finished product. That is when I got extra suspicious. I was told that “Friendship Bread” was an old Amish tradition (this is done as a selling point, I assume) but figured, anything with such a blatantly obvious adjective has got to be bad, right? I mean, for years I walked right by the closest neighborhood sushi (and never went in) because, and only because, it was called Amazing Sushi and everyone knows that anything called Amazing (fill-in-the-blank) has got to be major crap. (I later learned, in a desperately hungry moment of weakness that it is the best sushi in town.) …Read on