GREENVILLE, N.C. — When we get to my mother's house in Tennessee this weekend, there are two things we can count on for sure. One will be lemon and the other chocolate.
During the 350-mile drive, we'll restrict our sugar intake and remind our three daughters that when we get to Grandma's, there'll be pound cake aplenty.
Somewhere between the pages of Grandma's oldest cookbook are the original yellowed and brittle cake recipes she clipped from The Charlotte Observer as a young mother during the 1960s.
Except for a brief organic-flour kick mom went on two years ago, those cakes have tasted exactly the same since I was a kid. The only difference is that they were a rare treat back then.
On birthdays, we had our choice of lemon or chocolate pound cake and usually opted for the chocolate with chocolate fudge icing. My siblings and I have the recipes for mom's cakes, but the chocolate icing is the one ingredient none of us can replicate.
The recipe is merely a starting point for making mom's icing. Follow it to the letter 10 times and you'll experience 10 different outcomes, none of which may be particularly spreadable.
Success depends on a highly scientific combination of heat (regulated with a candy thermometer), constant stirring, ingredient tweaking, patience and timely adaptation to unforeseen changes in atmospheric pressure.
Attempting to create my mother's chocolate icing would frustrate Food Network guru Alton Brown, who has a penchant for explaining the science behind cooking.
There are certain controlled methods that go along with consuming Grandma's chocolate cake as well. Each kid takes a different approach.
Carly saves the icing for last; Julia eats the icing first, and then dips the cake in milk; and Noel cuts her cake into little pieces, mixing a bit of icing with every bite.
Cake at breakfast, lunch and dinner was not how my mother raised her children, but that was then. At some point, Grandmothers instinctively become unconcerned about child nutrition. Pushing vegetables is someone else's job.
My mother didn't grow up on candy and Coke, but times also had changed at her mother's house when my siblings and I were children. Grandma Walters kept a bowl of M&Ms on the coffee table and filled her fridge with those little 6 1/2-ounce bottles of Coke.
Try as mother did to regulate our sugar intake at Grandma Walters, it was an exercise in futility. Now the tables have turned again, which is the natural order of things.
Our daughters would have fun at Grandma's without baked goodies. There's a farm to romp around and cousins to romp with. But the icing on the cake, in this particular instance, happens to actually be icing on the cake.
On the way home from school today, I conducted a very unscientific test to see where Grandma's efforts line up regarding the eagerly awaited trip to Tennessee.
"What are we going to do," I asked, "when we get to Grandma's this weekend?"
"Eat cake!" they said in unison.
So let them eat cake.
Mark Rutledge writes for The Daily Reflector in Greenville, N.C. E-mail mrutledge AT coxnc.com
