A Cake for Alice

Alice is one year old today. She is my amazing, super-sweet, utterly adorable baby niece. The only thing that is not perfect about her is that she lives in Seattle and I live in San Francisco and I do not get to see her as much as I would like. Ah well, Alice is worth the wait.



I harbor secret dreams that when Alice is 16 and a jaded teenager, bored with Seattle and her parents, she will want to come to San Francisco and hang out with her cool Bohemian aunt (and that somehow in the interim I will have actually become a cool Bohemian aunt). I mentioned this to my brother when I was up in Seattle last summer. He looked at me, deadpan, and said: "Do you realize that when she is 16, you're going to be 50?"

Ah, brother dearest, but I am going to be a cool Bohemian 50-year-old.

Until that time I am going to be the best long-distance aunt I can, and visit as often as possible. I had planned on attending Alice's birthday party this weekend, but a nasty cold/flu/ear infection has kept me home (sorry, little one, I really wanted to be there). Instead I am going to have an Alice celebration of my own and bake a cake.

The origins of this cake go back long before Alice, into the far reaches of my own childhood birthday parties. When I was a child I wanted nothing more than a white cake from Safeway, with pictures of ballerinas drawn on in mounds of sugary colored icing. That was de rigeur at neighborhood birthday parties and I wanted one too.

Unfortunately for me, my mother was into health food. She wanted to give her children the absolutely best, healtiest food she could. We ate organic, much of our produce she grew herself in a huge garden that she somehow managed to cultivate while working (more than) full time and singlehandedly raising two children. My mother does not mess around, and she never takes the easy way out.

When it came to our birthday cakes, she went all the way. She managed to track down a bakery (in Bolinas, but of course) that made the absolutely healthiest cake you could find in the mid-1970s. It was whole-wheat, sweetened by date sugar, and topped with a white frosting made out of tofu.

There were no icing ballerinas involved.

My mother ordered this cake, which couldn't have been cheap, and drove 45 minutes, each way, out to Bolinas to get it. She brought it back and that was the birthday cake I had at my party. It was dense and heavy, from the unprocessed flour, and not terribly sweet. There might have been raisins or sunflower seeds involved (hello, it was 1977), and the tofu "icing" didn't stick to the sides but instead slipped off the cake (we are talking bean curd, after all).

It was the saddest birthday cake ever.

To give my mom credit, she was trying really hard. I've since asked her if she really thought that allowing us to eat sugar, one day out of the year, would have ruined us forever. She agrees it probably would not, but at the time she had no perspective. She was just trying to do the best she could for her kids, and since she was on her own there was no one to provide a voice of reason. As my friend Cheyenne recently said, with great wisdom and experience: "when a single mom goes over the edge, there is no one to pull her back."

My mom did mellow out over time. By the early 80s, when I was turning 11, she had allowed some sugar to enter out lives, at least on birthdays. My 11-year-old birthday party was held at Raydine's Ice Rink (now a Gold's Gym, and only us old-timers know that those big doors off the parking lot were made to let in the Zamboni Ice Machine). There were a dozen of my elementary school friends, awkward on our skates but having fun. My mom brought the cake.

This cake was from Sweet Things, an excellent bakery in Tiburon (simply addictive savory cheese cookies). The cake was a lemon pound cake, baked in a bundt mold, with streams of icing drizzled over it. It was decorated with pansy blossoms, yellow and purple. It smelled and looked delicious.

Still I was disappointed.

It was a lovely cake, but it was a cake for a grownup. I wanted mounds of sugary icing, tinted with food coloring, the picture of the ballerina (or ice skater) on top. I wanted the cheap Safeway cake, not this awfully pretty thing from a sophisticated bakery. I was deflated, I pouted, I shot my mom looks of angry disappointment. Could the woman do nothing right?

Then I tasted the cake.

It was amazing, even my 11-year-old palate could tell that. Sweet and tart and blissfully dense in the way a good pound cake should be. For a lemon-head such as myself, it was the perfect cake.

I've had one for every birthday since—because sometimes mom does know best.

For Alice's birthday I thought I'd bake a lemon pound cake. I recently reclaimed a haul of my baking dishes, long neglected at my mom's house (thanks mom, for the cake and so many other things). The minute I spied the bundt pan, unused for at least 10 years, I knew I had to make a lemon pound cake. And Alice is the perfect excuse.

This recipe is from Luscious Lemon Desserts, by Lori Longbotham, given to me a few years back by my friend Lisa. I must confess that, while I drooled over the pictures, I've never made anything from this book. I've just not been in a baking place these past few years. But Lori Longbotham is a woman after my lemon-loving heart. She calls lemon sweets the "divas of desserts," and says that this lemon pound cake would be the one dessert she would take to a desert island. That's good enough for me, and probably for Alice too.

But that's the funny thing about having little people in your life. I like to think that Alice will like lemons—if me and my mom are anything to go by, she definitely has it in her genes (my mom, after all, was the woman licking the remnants of the lemon marinade out of her saucer). But Alice will be her own person, and I can't wait to find out who that will be.

So happy birthday, baby girl. I'll see you down here in San Francisco in 15 years—give or take. And I'll have a cake waiting for you, whatever flavor you like.



ULTIMATE LEMON POUND CAKE
Adapted from Luscious Lemon Desserts, by Lori Longbotham

3 1/2 cups sifted cake flour (not self-rising)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 cup butter (3 sticks), at room temperature
2 3/4 cups sugar
6 large eggs
1 cup milk
2 tbs lemon zest
1 tsp lemon extract
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 c fresh lemon juice

For icing
1 cup confectioners' sugar
2 tbs lemon juice
pinch of salt
two drops each, lemon and vanilla extract

I used meyers lemons throughout (with many thanks to Susan B who is my friendly lemon supplier—that's kind of like a crack dealer, but legal).



Preheat the oven to 300°F. Butter and flour a 10-inch (12 cup) Bundt pan.

Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together twice.

Beat the butter with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add 1 3/4 cup of sugar, a little at a time, incoporating fully. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the flour and milk in small quantities, alternating back and forth, beginning and ending with the flour. Add 1 tsp lemon zest and the lemon and vanilla extract.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake for 1 1/2 hours, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 15 minutes (really, do this. I didn't and I should have).

Bring the remaining 1 cup sugar, 2 tsp lemon zest, and 1 cup lemon juice to a boil in a small saucepan, stirring until the sugar is dissolved.

Turn the cake out onto a platter and immediately brush with the hot syrup. I've increased the quantity of syrup here, so go wild. Let it soak in and come back an hour later and do more. In inject it in, if you have the means to do so. It's all about the syrup.

Because the lemon cake of my dreams has frosting drizzled over, I've added that as well. Mix the confectioners sugar with the lemon juice, salt, and lemon and vanilla extract. Drizzle over the top and let it pour in ribbons down the side. This will harden a bit, but not too much.

And because in my world you can never have too much lemon (and there is nothing like guilding the lily), I garnished this with some leftover lemon zest, which I mixed with granulated sugar (my health food loving mother just had a coronary upon reading that last sentence—don't worry, mom, I had a huge serving of broccoli immediately afterwards).

PS. I've heard reports of Alice's birthday party this past weekend. For my niece's first birthday cake, it was a white cake from Safeway mounded with sugary-sweet frosting. The kid doesn't know how good she's got it.