Bakers are magicians. It’s true, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, on television no less. Great and mighty sorcerers known to the layman as ‘Emeril’ or ‘Valastro’ would perform rituals before me. My mouth would be agape, and eyes wide open as they combined mundane ingredients and transformed them into delicacies that would make anyone’s mouth drool. I was spellbound then, condemned and cursed to recreate such wizardry in the kitchen from apple fritters to zucchini bread. But from all the creations I cultivated over the years, none had been more bewitching than a simple birthday cake for my mother.
I had just finished going grocery shopping for the day and I was walking into the kitchen, grocery bags in hand. I had bought only three things: a box of yellow cake mix, a packet of strawberry Jell-O, and a tub of cool whip. All of it had costed less than $7. I placed all the ingredients on the table and gazed at the recipe card. Its edges were crumpled and were yellowed by age and stain, but the recipe itself was still legible. A relic made by my grandmother’s once living hands; an archaic artifact made before the advent of cookbooks and baking blogs. Inscribed with flowery cursive written by ink guiding, not commanding, the creation of a dessert. One simply delicious, made all the more so by how deliciously simple it is to make. My eyes followed along the script as my hands performed its ritual.
I set the oven to the temperature required on the cake mix box, bringing out the bowl and ingredients all the while. This cake mix craves milk, vegetable oil, and egg. I acquiesce, providing the necessary components to perform alchemy. Yellow powder to yellow sludge. I then poured the mixed mix upon a sprayed cake pan, of the 9×13 inch variety, and placed it into the oven for however long the box dictates. The batter bakes, oppressive heat overhauling the mixture into a new form. The result: yellow sludge to yellow cake. The very same cake is removed from the oven and cools, its baking isn’t finished yet. It cools until the pan doesn’t hurt to touch or some other arbitrary measurement confirms the inertness of the cake. Then I grab a fork, and I poke the cake. The whole surface is buffeted and bored until it is covered with holes. A poke cake made.
The next step commenced thusly. A pot of water on a stove contained a rolling boil, a bubbling cauldron craving the sweet, strawberry red sand of the Jello whilst gurgling furious fluid. I fed it the very same and its fury subsides momentarily as the dust dissolves. Red sand to red water. Once all Jello is integrated, I added cold water. A desire now replaces the fury, one where the water solidifies into a smooth jelly that conforms to the shape of its container. Before it can begin to do so, the liquid is delicately drizzled upon the cake. Red water is poured upon pores on the cake, seeping whilst infusing the sweet structure changes that are sweeping and improving. The cake becomes wet as the pot runs dry. I then carried it to the fridge so that the Jello fully freezes within the cake. Hours passed before its transfiguration is complete, a creation thusly dubbed: strawberry poke cake. A final touch is added hours later. I opened a tub of cool whip and spread its contents upon the pink, porous pastry. Snow white whipped cream is draped with aluminum foil and stored back in the fridge, the birthday cake waiting for its person of interest.
What was supposed to be a magical birthday dinner was had in a mundane birthday fashion. There were no streamers, or balloons, or other cheap parlor tricks, only good food and a family to partake in. What it lacked in enchanting flair was more than made up with genuine substance. It was only after the final dinner plate was cleared that the cake was brought out and its foil covering removed. I wish I could say we gathered around and caroled the spellbinding song one usually gives to a human that advances a year in existence as they blow out their candles. But we didn’t. My mother is a salt-of-the-earth kind of soul, and all the “hooting and hollering” is irrelevant to a single important fact. We were all there together, and that was enough. The fact that her own son made her a birthday cake was the proverbial icing to the aforementioned cake. That same cake was sliced and divided out with utensils and the like as we waited for my mother to have the first bite.
“I’m excited to see how it turned out,” she said. She bit into the cake, and I noticed the look she gave. That was when I saw it.
People say that eyes are windows into the mind, and as I peered through her eyes and into her thoughts, into the memory that was summoned, I saw a little girl. A little girl being given a slice of cake by her mother, one that was made with yellow cake mix, strawberry Jello, and cool whip. That cake was magical, not because of some kitchen sorcery that was evocated by skill. It was because it had a real kind of magic, love. A love that could only be found in the same way a mother could love her child. It didn’t need to be the most extraordinary of cakes, or the most delectable, it simply had to be made for someone else in mind. To be given. For a brief second, everything in the world was beautiful, and nothing hurt. But that was only a memory, a moment that was. A moment that shall never be again. How could it?
She didn’t cry, but her eye took on that reddening, glassy look. She came to the same conclusion that I did. It was not the same cake from all those years ago, made with the same kind of love, but it was close. Close enough to evoke nostalgia, a time that happened once and can never happen again. A little girl with a mom, now a woman with a son. That was the look she gave when she took that bite. That cake had only three main ingredients, but that was enough to bring back a cherished memory to my mother; a moment that was believed to have been lost forever. What can you call that if not magic?
“How does it taste?” I asked.
“Simply delicious,” she responded.
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