Title: Cakewalk : a memoir /
Authors: Moses, Kate
Publisher: Dial Press,
Year: 2010
Subjects: Moses, Kate; Moses, Kate Childhood and youth.; Women authors, American Biography; Authors, American Biography.; Desserts United States.; Cooking, American
Abstract: "Growing up in the 1960s and '70s, Kate Moses was surrounded by sugar: Twinkies in the basement freezer, honey on the fried chicken, Baby Ruth bars in her father's sock drawer. But sweetness of the more intangible variety was harder to come by. Her parents were disastrously mismatched, far too preoccupied with their mutual misery to notice its effects on their kids. A frustrated artist, Kate's beautiful, capricious mother lived in a constant state of creative and marital emergency, enlisting Kate as her confidante--'We're the girls, we have to stick together'-- and instructing her three children to refer to her in public as their babysitter. Kate's father was aloof, ambitious, and prone to blasts of withering abuse increasingly directed at the daughter who found herself standing between her embattled parents. Kate looked for comfort in the imaginary worlds of books and found refuge in the kitchen, where she taught herself to bake and entered the one realm where she was able to wield control. Telling her own story with the same lyricism, compassion, and eye for lush detail she brings to her fiction, coupled with the candor and humor she is known for in her personal essays, Kate Moses leavens each tale of her coming-of-age in Cakewalk with a recipe from her lifetime of confectionary obsession"--Page 2 of cover.
Contents: Recipes: Plenty of chocolate cake with mocha frosting -- Hills Family sugar cookie cutouts -- Pa's fudge -- Faux Pa's fudge -- Vanilla birthday cake with lemon curd and simple vanilla buttercream -- Pink and white animal cookies -- Blackberry jam and variations -- Coconut layer cake -- It's -- its from your own cow -- Peanut butter cookies -- Verboten German chocolate cake -- Caramel corn -- Hills Family Christmas gingerbread cookies -- Free-form crostatas with crumble topping -- Panoramic easter eggs -- Jam tarts -- French toast, without the penicillin -- Moose nugget candy -- Rhubard crisp -- Absolutely best chocolate chip cookies -- German pancake -- Carrot cupcakes -- Fudge brownies two (or more) ways -- Angel food cake -- Chocolate truffles -- Spiced pecan birthday cake -- Linger torte -- Strawberry shortcake for my mother -- Persimmon parfait, after M.F.K. Fisher, with walnut-black pepper biscotti -- Kay Boyle's pain au chocolat bread pudding -- Alicia's blondies -- Brown sugar pound cake for the artistically discriminating -- My Father's favorite cheesecake.