For Mom

As I was researching my talk for Stone Soup this weekend I realized how much my love of baking comes from my mom. My mom is a wonderful cook. I had a sweet tooth as a child. Still do. Mom allowed me complete freedom in the kitchen. She taught me the basics of baking and I taught myself to bake new things as soon as I could read cookbooks. Mom used to say I made better meringues than she did. I had beginner's luck and a naive fearlessness.

My mom made me fantastic birthday cakes. My childhood birthdays each had a theme.  My favourite was my Raggedy Anne cake made with coconut on the icing. Mom indulged my love of chocolate and she made really good cakes from scratch with farm eggs. Cake mixes were a joke to me. Who needs a mix for something as easy as a basic cake? In fact, cake mixes were an insult to the intelligent home baker. Icing in a tin was an abomination. Frozen Sarah Lee cakes were the Food of the Damned. We were country women and we baked from scratch.

Today sweet friend Catherine made some blackberry oatmeal squares from scratch in honor of Mother's Day which we ate in her dining room with whipped cream. She thickens frozen blackberries with cornstarch and cooks them down with brown sugar. Delicious!

Happy Mother's Day!