As there was no actual person named Betty Crocker, perhaps she never had a friend named Bonnie for whom this yellow cake is named. I hadn’t thought of that cake for years – ok, maybe decades – but just its name brought back memories. College day memories, and, yes, I’m now old enough to be one of those people who wax poetic about the romance of those years. But it was romance, in all its forms. The adventures of learning and being on my own, testing out what felt at the time like my absolute maturity. The loves I created with women who are still my dearest friends, the attempts at love and romance and sex with men that were awkward and stilted and messy and painful and just about anything except a sustaining love life. The perfect blend of college-age enthusiasm and belief in invincibility, combined with bone-chilling self-doubt and fears of not fitting in or being liked/loved.
My senior year of college I lived in a house that for some reason had not yet been condemned, with four other women. College housing: inadequate heat, one girl’s room was what we loving called the original coat closet (off the front door, not much bigger than a steamer trunk), and we even had our requisite night with a bat in the house. I loved that house. I loved that year. I loved those friends.
And then there was the cake. The roommate who made this cake made a lot of baked desserts, cakes and eventually pies. One roommate was more of a peanut-butter-added-to-macaroni-and-cheese gal. One roommate was farm-raised, and liked to keep meals within the meat/starch realm. Another roommate favored large chunks of cheese from her hometown. My contribution? I’m feeling, now, that it was a bit weak. I could make Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in a hot pot, I could heat pizza on the bottom portion of my corn popper, and I could find the best, gooiest, breadiest, cheesiest pizza in town. Maybe I once or twice whipped up two of my Mom’s most crowd-pleasing entrees, both circa the 1970’s Campbell Soup recipe blitz, where America’s homemakers were learning to do a lot with instant rice, canned soup, and, forever after, the blissfully salty/sweet magic of Lipton’s Onion Soup in dried packets. My mom has a sweet and sour meatball recipe that manages to include instant rice, white sugar and lemon juice (it’s the bomb, especially with a side of mashed potatoes to sop up the extra rice-sweet sauce); and she does a thing with Campbell’s cream of whatever-comes-in-beige soups, instant rice, chicken and, you guessed it, topped off with a packet of Lipton’s Onion Soup. It shouldn’t be as good as it is. To this day, I’ve converted many friends, and their children, over to the joys of these two examples of 1970’s style cooking. I even spent a few years trying to upgrade the recipes to make them healthier – substituting ground turkey in the meatballs, whole grain rice, trying home-made cream soups, but truthfully, the flavor wasn’t there – the dishes became something to eat, but lacked the flavor memory that made them sing (and no one oohed and aahed over them, so what’s the point?).
Last night I made another old favorite from my Mom: peanut butter cookies with the Hershey’s kiss in the middle. My son helped me with each step, and we made much-too-big cookies for what the recipe called for, so instead of making 48 cookie dough balls and sticking 48 kisses in them, we had 17. This is about the number of cookies my son can make before he gets bored. His first bite released a melodic “Awesome” that spanned several additional syllables. My husband’s response was that he had been thinking about an ex’s peanut butter cookies recently, the best he’d ever had, and whether he could dare ask me to make them and, of course, he knew he couldn’t, and now he doesn’t need to. “What cookies? Were there ever peanut butter cookies before these?”
For me, they were delicious and memory-laden, the best food combination I can imagine. I don’t think I ever made a Bonnie Butter Cake on my own; I always left it for my friend to make (I helped her in college, I’m just sure I did). But maybe it’s time for me to bake one. I checked my seemingly ancient Betty Crocker Cookbook only to find that it’s too modern (1986!) and the recipe is omitted. But thanks to the Internet, the recipe is completely accessible. Imagine the memories it would evoke. Yum!
Image adapted from ifood.tv
No comments:
Post a Comment