Every family has its traditions. They may shift a bit as each generation takes up their part, but they remain recognizable. I know there are things my mother’s family does that arrived in America with my grandparents. One of those is to serve Sunshine Cake for every major Jewish holiday except Passover, when it isn’t kosher. Today being Rosh Hashonah, that cake had to be on the table at brunch.
Sunshine Cake is a citrus flavored sponge cake, assembled with great care so that when it puffs in the oven, it comes close to overflowing a 10 inch tube pan. My grandmother made it for as long as I can remember until her health and memory became too fragile for her to be safe around an oven. Mom wanted to learn, but Gram never made the cake unless it was for a big family occasion, and then it was too important to let Mom try and risk the failure inherent in first-attempt sponge cakes. Years later, after Gram had died, Mom pulled rank and insisted I let her make the sponge cake for my holiday dinner. Sure enough, it was grainy, streaked with unmixed egg white, and about half the height it should have been. She apologized, and I quickly made another cake.
Gram didn’t exactly teach me, either, but I have inherited the duty of preparing the Sunshine Cake. Gram had her first heart attack (of a total of three) when I was 10 years old. I was staying the summer with my grandparents, so Gramps had to figure out what to do with me with Gram in the hospital. Figuring out what to do with a girl-child was not his forte, and neither was doing without Gram. I’m not entirely sure he had ever done the grocery shopping on his own before that week. He had only the vaguest notions of household management. But one of those notions was that if people came to visit, you had to have something to serve. Tea and cake was a minimum. And the only cake he could think of was Gram’s Sunshine Cake.
He knew it took a lot of eggs, and he knew we needed several cakes. So he came home with 5 dozen extra large eggs, which he then had to figure out how to fit into a refrigerator of the size current in 1960, which is when he had bought the one they had in 1968. He finally accomplished it, but then asked me to use up the eggs. “Make a few of Gramma’s special cakes” he told me. “We’ll freeze them, and then when company comes to visit while she’s recovering, she won’t have to make anything.”
It didn’t occur to me that it might be beyond my skills, so I set about doing it. I hunted through Gram’s cookbooks, and finally found a recipe that looked like it might have the right flavors in it. Then I pulled out her mixer (I still have it: Sunbeam model 1) and went at it. The first one was a citrus omelet – sweet and tender but only about two inches high. For the second I beat the egg whites until I was certain they were stiff enough. It was vulcanized and completely inedible. By then Gram was allowed to have a phone in her room, so I called her. I was using the wrong recipe, she told me. It had been her mother’s, and was hand written in the back of her favorite cookbook.
Correct recipe in hand and Gram’s verbal instructions in mind, I did it again. Success! I made 4 more cakes in the next 2 days, until we were down to one dozen eggs. They were sliced and frozen, and I was tremendously proud when we served them with tea and Gram told everyone who came that I had made them while she was still in hospital.
So now the mantle of creating the citrus sponge cake has passed to me. Yesterday I ran out of time, so when my son got me up at cockadoodle dark this morning, I determined to make the cake. I had copied the recipe and put it in one of my own cookbooks years ago. Only I couldn’t find that cookbook. I turned the house upside down, and could not find that book anywhere. I couldn’t call my mom and have her read it to me, not at that hour. I sat down with a stack of vintage cookbooks and prepared to figure it out somehow.
But as I sat there, reading recipes, I realized I was comparing them to the one in my head. “No” I thought. “It takes 1/2 a teaspoon of lemon extract and 2 tablespoons of orange juice.” Or “This one calls for 1/4 cup of boiling water. Gram’s uses half that.” And then I realized. When I made 5 cakes in two days, all those years ago, I memorized the recipe. I closed the book in my lap, put it and all its kith and kin away, and started gathering ingredients. Eight eggs. Orange juice. Cream of tartar. Lemon extract. Vanilla. Cake flour. Sugar. I put it all on the counter, and began assembling the cake. Family consesus was that it tasted just like Gram’s and Great-aunt Hannah’s and Great-grandmother’s. My place is in the line as cake-maker, just as cousin Miriam makes the challah, Aunt Jerri the strudel, and Aunt Judy the kugel.
But I still don’t know what Gramps was thinking when he brought home 60 eggs.