A Long Line of Cakes

by Deborah Wiles

  When bakeries were established in early cities, they were often built on the outskirts of town for fear of fire. Bakers came into town with their carts piled high with bread to sell. If the baker had a family, the entire family was involved in the hard work of baking and then selling door-to-door or in a marketplace each day, much like every Cake is involved in their family business.

  As towns grew and prospered, itinerant merchants and tradespeople often settled there. Sometimes they were viewed with suspicion and their motives were questioned, as they had no kin or acquaintances in their chosen home and no history with the town’s inhabitants. Therefore, according to mistrustful townsfolk, they had no good reason to stay. Sometimes those vagabonds were indeed swindlers, but more often they were ready, as the world changed and became more connected, to make a permanent home. “The stranger comes to town” is an ancient story still told today, and is part of the Cakes’ journey as well.

  Today, itinerant workers with specialized jobs may travel with carnivals or bring their tools with them to construction sites or engineering projects. They might set up pop-up shops or trunk shows or trade exhibitions or Christmas tree lots—or a temporary storefront. A bakery, perhaps.

  * * *

  Merchant mariners (who are never called sailors) are itinerant as well, and make their homes on their ships, if they are crewing deep-sea vessels. They also operate tugboats, ferries, dredges, barges, and towboats along many US waterways.

  Merchant Marine tanker ships carry imports (that often end up in those delivery trucks heading for your neighborhood stores) and exports and passengers across the sea between nations during peacetime, and can be commissioned by the US Navy during wartime when they are assigned to deliver supplies and troops into war zones. Merchant Marine ships were torpedoed and shelled, and hundreds of mariners, both men and women, were prisoners of war during World War II.

  Norwood Boyd is in part based on seventy-six-year-old James A. Logan, a fifty-year veteran of the Merchant Marines and chief cook on the SS Joshua Hendy.

  From “The Log of the West Coast Maritime Industries” Vol. 30 No. 7 July 1944:

  More cooks and bakers are urgently needed by the Merchant Marine, especially men with the spirit and talents of men like James A. Logan, 76, who is rounding out half a century of seafaring. Logan is now presiding over the galley of the SS Joshua Hendy, last reported somewhere in the Mediterranean.

  The master of the Liberty ship, Captain William F. Barry of Seattle Washington, addressed the following letter to the War Shipping Administration recently:

  On board this vessel I have as chief cook James A. Logan, a veteran of 49 years at sea. His food is varied, carefully and tastefully prepared and attractively served. He runs a spotless galley like clockwork. Logan works wholeheartedly to conserve food, saves and flattens every tin can, renders out every bit of fat for grease, and discards nothing. He always has time to have a bit of cake or cookie for the crew, merchant or armed guard at coffee time and I have never heard a complaint of any sort about the feeding on board. Moreover, his ration cost is well below the average for the United States-operated vessels.

  The important thing about Logan is that he could well afford to spend his remaining days quietly ashore but he prefers to do his bit where he can best serve.

  As the ship’s baker, Archibald Cake would have been the “second cook” in the steward department, working under the chief cook and chief steward.

  The word itinerant is derived from the Latin iter, meaning way or journey. I wanted to write about the journey we all take, no matter who we are or what our circumstance. All over the world humans journey, sometimes outward, sometimes inward, sometimes both. We can live in a generational homeplace or be itinerant. Maybe we are migrants, or nomads, or refugees—sometimes we are all these astonishments in a lifetime.

  We wander and we experience. We run from, we run to. We welcome and we reject. We forget and we remember. We leave and we return. We strive and we lift up others in the struggle.

  Each day we begin again in our quest to be safe, to be loved, to belong, and to find home.

  And if we are lucky, there is cake.

  From the Cake Family Cake Archive original ­recipe by Leita White-Cake-Is-My-Favorite Cake recipe adapted with plenty of step-by-step ­instructions by Emma Alabama Lane Cake with help from Ruby Lavender

  This is a three-layer cake perfect for parties of any kind or for eating in thick slices after baseball practice. It will make 24 cupcakes if you prefer cupcakes, but we really like layer cake around here.

  Pay attention to your mixing technique and be sure to measure properly. Then your white cake will be both elegant and toothsome, with a perfect vanilla flavor. You don’t need a box mix when you’ve got a cake this simple to put together. A cake made from scratch tastes better and is a lot more satisfying to make and eat.

  3 cake pans, 8” rounds are best

  2 mixing bowls, one for dry ingredients, and one for wet

  1 small bowl in which to capture egg yolks (you will only use the whites)

  1 small bowl for the egg whites

  An electric hand mixer or stand mixer with beaters

  A rubber spatula for scraping the bowls

  A wooden spoon just in case

  Measuring cups and spoons

  A sifter, if you have one (if not, a fork will do)

  A 1 cup glass measuring cup

  A small spoon or fork for stirring now and then (see instructions)

  A paper bag or parchment paper to line the cake pans with

  A pair of scissors with which to cut the paper

  A pencil for drawing around the pans on the paper before you cut it

  An oven for baking the layers

  Hot pads or oven mitts and a dish towel or two for convenience

  A sink for crashing the dishes

  A plate or paper bag for each layer as it waits for frosting

  OR a cake rack for cooling

  A kitchen knife or metal spatula for frosting your cake

  A toothpick, maybe several

  A cake plate or a cake stand for your finished cake

  1 grown-up who will open hot oven doors, fix the mixer when it goes haywire, hold the sifter for you while you turn it, eyeball your measurements, break your eggs if you’re queasy about getting your fingers gooey, and otherwise offer an extra pair of hands and sometimes unwanted opinions

  1 cup milk

  1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

  1 cup butter, softened

  3 cups cake flour

  1 tablespoon baking powder

  5 egg whites

  Make the cake first.

  BEFORE YOU GET STARTED: Take four sticks of butter (this equals two cups of butter) out of the refrigerator and put them on the counter to soften—two sticks are for the cake, and two are for the Cloudburst Frosting. If you’re not going to be making Cloudburst Frosting, just take out two sticks of butter. Let them soften while you gather your equipment and ingredients, line your cake pans, and read over your recipe. Always read the whole recipe before you begin to bake. That way there are no surprises in the middle of mixing.

  1.Wash and dry your hands. Put on an apron. A towel pinned around your waist or your granddad’s old shirt worn backward works as an apron if you don’t have one. Thank you for that tip, Ruby Lavender.

  2.Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

  3.Line the bottom of your three cake pans with paper or parchment. I cut open a bag from the Piggly Wiggly, or (unused) paper lunch bags, put the pans on the bag, draw around the bottom of them with a pencil, and then cut out the circles and place them flat on the bottom of each pan. You do not need to grease or flour your pans. The paper on the bottom will help your layers fall right out after they have cooled, especially if you have used paper bags. Find some.

  Set the pans aside.

  4.Pour 1 cup of milk into the 1 cup glass measuring cup. Add the vanilla and stir with the small spoon or fork.

  5.Unwrap t
wo sticks of butter and put them in one of the mixing bowls. Beat the softened butter at medium speed with your mixer until it’s creamy. Gradually add the sugar and beat until the whole thing is light as a feather and very fluffy.

  6.In the second mixing bowl, sift together the cake flour and baking powder. If you have no sifter, use a fork to fluff it all together and mix it well. Then add the flour and baking powder mix to the butter mixture alternately with your milk mixture, beginning and ending with the flour mixture. So add a bit of flour mix, a bit of milk, repeat until you finish with the flour mix. Beat at low speed just until blended after each addition. Don’t beat it up but make sure everything is blended in.

  7.Separate the five eggs. Carefully crack each egg in half at the middle (tapping it smartly against the side of a bowl works well) and (also carefully) separate the shell into two halves, using your thumbs. Keep the yolk in one half of the eggshell while you let the white slip into a small bowl beneath the egg. Your fingers will get messy but you can wash them later.

  Gently plop the yolk into the other half eggshell and let more white fall into the small bowl. Do this, back and forth for each egg until you have all the whites in the bowl. Put each yolk in another bowl, cover it, put it in the refrigerator, and save your yolks for another cake or to add to scrambled eggs the next morning.

  This step may be hard at first, but it just takes practice. Soon you will ace it and teach your best friend how to do it.

  8.Use a dishcloth to wipe clean your flour-mix bowl (it’s empty now), and put your egg whites in it (alternatively, you can just crack the eggs over this bowl and put all the whites in it, as long as you have a clean, empty bowl when you start). Beat the egg whites at medium speed until they form stiff peaks. How to know you have beat the eggs into stiff peaks: turn off the mixer and lift the beaters up and down several times in the egg whites. The white tips should look like one of the spiky hairdos at Pip’s. If they aren’t spiky enough, beat a little more. They’ll get there.

  9.Use your rubber spatula to fold your egg whites into the batter you’ve prepared. Fold means just that. Tuck in your egg whites, like they’re going to bed and you’re pulling the covers up with the batter. Work in a big circle, up and over and down and up. Turn the bowl each time you fold. Do it several times. Be gentle.

  10.When you’ve got everything folded in and it’s all one color, pour your batter into the three 8” pans. Try to put roughly the same amount of batter into each pan. Use the rubber spatula to get all the batter out of the bowl. Put the pans in the preheated oven, on the same rack and not touching, and put the timer on for 20 minutes.

  11.When the timer goes off, check the layers by seeing if a toothpick inserted into the middle of one comes out clean. The sides of the cake should also pull away from the pan a little bit. If the cake isn’t quite done all the way through, run it back in the oven for 3 or 4 more minutes, but don’t overcook.

  12.Remove the cake from the oven, and let it cool in the pans for about an hour. It will sigh and pull itself together in the pan and continue cooking gently as it cools. Then, run your kitchen knife inside the pan and around the edges of the cake, to make sure none of the sides have stuck to the cake pan.

  13.Using an oven mitt, turn the cake pan upside down and give it a crack onto a plate or a cooling rack, whichever you have. Don’t break the plate—you can crack the pan onto the counter and “catch” the layer as it falls out. (This is one reason you want to leave it in the pan for an hour.) If you use a plate, put parchment paper or wax paper on it so the layer doesn’t stick to the plate.

  14.When the layers are completely cool, you can slowly peel off the paper on the bottom of each layer and then frost the layers with the Cloudburst Vanilla Frosting that you will make next—if you haven’t eaten the cake already. I’m looking at you, Ruby Lavender.

  Ingredients You Will Need For The Cloudburst Frosting:

  1 cup butter, softened (two of the sticks you took out of the fridge earlier)

  1/4 teaspoon salt

  1 (32 ounce) package powdered sugar

  6 to 7 tablespoons milk (whole is best)

  1 tablespoon vanilla extract (real vanilla extract will make a big difference)

  1.You can use one of your cake mixing bowls, because you washed them while the cake was baking, right?

  2.In a mixing bowl, beat your now-softened butter and salt together at medium speed with the hand or stand electric mixer for 1 to 2 minutes or until dreamy-creamy.

  3.Gradually add the powdered sugar alternately with the milk. So a little powdered sugar, a little milk, back and forth. Keep beating at low speed while you are doing this. (A stand mixer really helps, because you’ll have two free hands.)

  4.Stir in the vanilla. I like to reserve one of my tablespoons of milk to add in after I add the vanilla. Either way is fine. If you added it all in step 3, that’s okay. If your frosting feels too stiff, you can add a little more milk and beat the mixture on low speed until it’s the consistency you like. Trust your instincts here. You don’t want it so gloopy it will slide off the sides of your cake.

  5.Now you are ready to ice your cake! Frosting a cake is part art, part skill. But don’t worry about it. Every cake looks great after it’s frosted. Start with the bottom layer. Put it in the middle of your cake plate. Using a spoon as a scoop, top the layer with frosting. Use a kitchen knife or metal cake spatula to smooth the frosting across the top.

  Add the next layer and top it with frosting. Add the final layer and top it as well. I often stop frosting here because I like the sides without frosting. If you aren’t frosting the sides, you can put lots of frosting between layers. If you are frosting the sides, make sure you put less frosting between layers. Your eye will tell you what to do.

  Don’t forget to lick the beaters, the spatula, and the bowl when you are done, if the rest of your family doesn’t get to them first. Store your cake covered with a cake pan lid or make a tent over it with aluminum foil. It will stay fresh for about three days. But it won’t last that long.

  “Bon appétit!” as Finesse would say.

  To be back in Aurora County, Mississippi, again is a pleasure as sweet as a four-layer Lane cake. Love, Ruby Lavender first appeared in print in 2001, after a ten-year wasteland of rejections (of many a manuscript) followed by five years of hilariously flattening hard labor, on both our parts, as I learned how to write a novel with Liz Van Doren at Harcourt Books. So I’m indebted to Liz for seeing the possibilities in the original picture-book world of Halleluia, Mississippi, and a little girl’s love for her grandmother and all things Southern in Love, Ruby Lavender.

  Each Little Bird That Sings followed Ruby, and The Aurora County All-Stars followed Little Bird. An Aurora County universe was born, which surprised us all, and now here comes Emma Lane Cake with her story and A Long Line of Cakes to astonish us once again.

  Ardent thanks to Scholastic Press for the opportunity to revisit Aurora County with a brand-new story and a return to familiar characters loved by me and by the readers who discovered Aurora County as kids; who, as parents and teachers, shared the books with young readers; who included them in Battles of the Books, on state book award lists, and as school and community one-book projects; and who welcomed me to their schools and libraries and bookstores and fed me (often literally!) with their delight in these characters and their stories. What an adventure it has been!

  Thank you to my editor David “Babka” Levithan for saying yes, and for shepherding this book into print. His thoughtful questions, along with our conversations and shared enthusiasms for Emma’s story, have made me a better writer. Thanks to everyone at Scholastic for offering me a haven in which to shelter, and the spaciousness from which to create. I appreciate all of you.

  The measure, pour, and bake of partnership is important to me, so I especially thank Steven Malk for nineteen years of a cup of this, a pinch of that, stir vigorously.

  Thank you, Janie Kurtz, for those read-aloud days in May. Thanks to Micha
el Hill for the loan of his lovable canines. Bless you, Roger Purser, for sharing your many talents and for allowing me to use the names of your rowdy brothers in this book. Rest in peace, gentle spirit.

  I wrote this story while pulling loaves of memory and imagination from the shelves of a sturdy baker’s rack held in place by a wildly generous, completely unhinged, totally together, unwavering-in-their-love-for-me family, both chosen and inherited. Here is all my love back to you, layers upon layers. I know how lucky I am.

  Copyright © 2018 by Deborah Wiles

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  First edition, September 2018

  Cover illustration © 2018 Joanne Lew-Vriethoff

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-15050-6

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