christmas presents, pt 2

aside from being an all-around great human being, my mother owned a small business where she made and decorated cakes from our converted basement. in addition to getting an amazing prize of her hand-written recipe books and some cherished, well-used other cookbooks with filled post-it notes to me as a way to guide me through many of the recipes (i can't go through those yet, but i'm seriously considering putting them in a firesafe or safety deposit box), she gave me her entire cake decorating and tip collection.


i also have a lot of her cake pans, and by a 'lot' i mean probably 8 or 10 of the best or most functional. it sounds so silly, but those baking pans are so precious to me, you have no idea... pans used from birthdays long ago, pans she used so often that i can decorate imaginary cakes from memory. for christmas i decided to split up most of the supplies between my brother, my godfather, and myself. all three of us had expressed interest in keeping up with the lessons my mother taught each of us long ago, and there are more than enough supplies to go around.



her flower tip stands (little stand the size of a standard long nail with a flat metal surface attached to the top, where you attach a small piece of parchment paper and can build up icing flowers and roses by piping with a flower tip and twirling the stand around) brought back so many memories, of watching, raptured, her twirling the stand around her fingers and in seconds sliding off a perfectly formed icing rose, of the dozens of flower lessons, of scraping my sloppy icing mounds back into the bowl, disappointed with the imperfection. seeing all of these tools has awakened a determination to get back into cake decorating, a clear channel to reconnect with buried memories of my mother at her most dazzling and brilliant, creatively speaking.



each of these tips has its own oral history, own memory attached, so having enough to split between the three of us was so lovely. a way to keep it moving, keep the lessons, the stories, the history moving, giving it a newfound trajectory.