Hello! Hello!
I’m in NYC getting the all-clear from docs to fly. Also sitting at the desk I’ve worked at for so many years (I wrote Sweet Times, my first cookbook, here), and looking at books that I shelved before search engines replaced The American Heritage Dictionary or the Larousse French-English English-French Dictionary.
Behind me is my wall-long pin-up board with old-old photos and clippings and a couple of “new” ones from just before Joshua and Linling were married 6 years ago this week.
As though this weren’t making me nostalgic enough, I came across a little story I wrote about baking with my granddaughter Gemma when she was 29 months old — exactly the age that her sister VV is now. Since that time, we’ve baked many things together — we even baked VV’s first-birthday cake. And a birthday cake for Daddy. Lots of cookies, too. And VV quickly joined us.
When my son, Joshua (many of you knew him when he was “The Kid”), was just a few months old, the pediatrician told us that we’d know we no longer had a baby when the little dimples on his hands disappeared. I loved those little dimples and I hoped that they’d stay forever. Now I’m watching my granddaughter Gemma’s hands and holding on to the same foolish hope that she won’t outgrow the little pudge of them and the dimples.
She’s 29 months old, dimples intact and fingers just long enough to wrap around a cupcake. I got to spend the holiday weekend with the kids and Gemma and I got to play in the kitchen together. We made oatmeal cookies — I used the recipe straight from the Quaker Oats box — and we frosted cupcakes that I’d baked the night before. We’d stir the frosting for a couple of seconds and then Gemma would say, “Taste!”
Soon we were doing a lot more tasting than we were mixing, but every cook and baker knows that you’ve got to taste as you go, so I decided that the gobs of sugar and cocoa she was eating were all in the service of teaching her good kitchen habits. In fact, I was learning something too, something I know — something most of us know — but something that’s so easy to forget: Not everything has to be perfect to be good.
The frosting Gemma and I made was a mess! The butter wasn’t beaten enough to be smooth. The cocoa was a little lumpy and the powdered sugar was even lumpier. And neither of us was very steady when we poured the milk into the bowl, and so the frosting was too thin. We added more sugar. It was a little too thick. We add more milk. We tasted and tasted and tasted — I wish I had a picture of Gemma with chocolate fingers and a frosting mustache — and then decided to go with what we had.
And to be proud of it!
We were having too much fun stirring and tasting and frosting and licking fingers and handing out cupcakes to fuss about lumps and lopsidedness. I’ve often said that perfection is overrated. Sometimes I forget that. This weekend, I remembered.
Sometime over the weekend, I tried to tie my bandana around Gemma’s neck, but she had a better idea — bunny got the bandana.
And “Pa” got the apple. And the order to “Eat it!”
I also got to “do books” with Gemma before bedtime and to be reminded of the genius of Eric Carle (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?) and to discover the beauty of Pete Oswald’s illustrations in Hike.
Friends, friends, what do you see?
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What a special weekend of memories in the making! Makes me miss the dimples in my own kid’s hands AND baking with them. What a mess it used to be. It was glorious!
My granddaughter is 3 1/2. (All the others are teens and beyond.) I’ve never enjoyed baking more in my life! I’m surprised there is any dough left by the time we’re done mixing since those little hands go in for a glob every chance she gets. I love the fact that her mother doesn’t bake, so we get to make the cupcakes and cookies to send to school. :) We have the best time!!! Loved the pics of your little ones. So adorable!!!
I’m off to Paris in Oct. armed with a list of new Patisseries to try!