A 'Palmful'

I made her specifically measure out what a “palmful” was once. Her voice echoes in my mind as I type this, “You know. A palmful.” She’ll even cup one hand to show the concept with a tone in her voice that hints at the ridiculousness of my inability to know.

My eyes roll even now on recall. My response always along the lines of, “Well your ‘palmful’ is very different than mine.”

I am a recipe follower. My mom, not so much. Her explanations always include something like a handful of this here, a pinch of that there, and the pièce de résistance the ‘palmful’. And to my dismay a recipe with such measurements can never truly be recreated.

But is that the point life is trying to make? Are our childhood memories of things once loved destined to fade away because we cannot quite recreate the recipes? The nostalgia of a past life.

Oh nostalgia.

The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as follows:

I would not say I am an overly nostalgic person. But there are a few things I could groan on about having appreciated more in my childhood. I technically am an ‘elder millennial’ after all. But I digress.

For most of my childhood recipes I’ve gotten as close to memory as possible. As close as my own ‘palmful’ can get me. But there remains one illusive concoction that always falls short of expectation (or hope) and it is the one I wish to recreate the most. The recipe for my mom’s chocolate cake icing. The icing she made particularly for my chocolate birthday cake.

I am in no way a cake or cookies fan. Give me hard packed sugary treats like nerds, pixie sticks, and (particularly cherry) laffy taffy. My blood sugar level is rising just writing this. My glands salivating like a Pavlov pup. It also does not help matters that four of the six people in my immediate family have birthdays in March. (Two sharing the same day, the third eight days after and the fourth eight days after that.) I loved how everyone, even those who share the same actual day, got their own cake. But by the end of March, even a commercial for cake would make me nauseous. Luckily three months would pass until my mother and my birthdays occurred, and even then ours are only three days apart.

As I wrote above, with most of her recipes I have been able to get them as close to tasting like memory as possible. We’ve filled the notes app in my phone with step-by-step dictation (including photos) of my favourite childhood meals. But the icing recipe is the most finicky of them all. It has no written origin, no book to locate, or recipe card to photograph. There are no ingredients removed or added in my mom’s mostly delicate, rarely illegible black penned scroll. The culprit usually a smudge by a greasy fingerprint or the splash of an over-whisked ingredient. The icing recipe exists solely in her mind and my tastebuds.

She can tell me what is in the icing but there is nary a ‘palmful’ in sight! And even then the ingredients are as shifty as her recipe. There are no measurements to speak of! None! Zero! Zilch! And she can make it perfect every time. Tasting along the way with a tsk as she adds a drop, dash, or spoonful of an ingredient already in the mix.

I am sure you have been eagerly awaiting the ingredients for this icing recipe and I want to warn you that separately they appear meager but together and loving slabbed onto any boxed cake (don’t get me started on this) result in one of the best things I have ever and will ever taste.

My mother’s icing ingredients include:

• Cocoa

• Icing sugar

• A lot of butter (and I have found out my definition of ‘a lot’ of butter is much larger than the average childhood)

• Water/a ‘wet ingredient’ - which is almost always hot coffee (“an additive to use but not always and when convenient.”)

That is a direct quote! And my jaw is clenched. My success often hinges upon the additive of coffee (which I rarely drink - it's almost always tea for me please and thank you)!

So I wonder if I am doomed to failure. To continue this loop of the proverbial definition of insanity; and create and recreate the recipe, expecting a different result. If the chocolate cake that I have recently brought out of the oven and cooled is yet another sacrificial lamb to be doused in coca, icing sugar, a lot of butter (too much butter to be measured without internal guilt) and the coffee I purchase just for this round of trial and failure.

The icing bowl tastes close, but the true test is before me. The cake is now iced, a knife having separated a stunning single slice (the size of said slice arbitrary) and my fork poised. A part of me knows it will not be correct, but I wonder if despite my moaning, half the fun is in the attempt. That one day, one glorious day, I will get the recipe correct. (And promptly forget how many ‘palmfuls’ got me there.)