September 14, 2015 | Occasus | Issue 5 | Fiction

Take the Cake

        On a sunny July afternoon, I stand flushed and exasperated in my parents’ kitchen as my hopes of a perfect looking birthday cake melt into a sticky heap of lemon filling.
        “It’s fine. I’m fine. Will you just get out of the kitchen?”
        The words fly out of my mouth before I can catch them, and my mother, who has been hovering by the counter offering suggestions, wordlessly exits.   
        I fight the urge to bring my fist down hard onto the precariously stacked layers as they slide slowly off the cake stand in front of me. Yellow filling oozes as if the cake is sticking out its tongue at me. The layers are too heavy, the filling is too runny, and the icing just isn’t thick enough to hold everything together. I’m trying to copy the photograph of a perky yellow cake wearing a pristine coat of frosting but my cake is lumpy and lopsided. After almost an hour of fighting with the thing, there are crumbs in the icing. I hate crumbs in my icing.
        Such are the joys of baking a birthday cake.

        When I look through my parents’ old photo albums, there are almost as many photographs of cake as there are pictures of family members. In one of my favourite photos, my brother stands on a chair in my grandparents’ house surveying the elaborate landscape of a Thomas the Tank Engine birthday cake. Thomas trundles along on plastic train tracks through a forest of evergreen trees. A colourful border of hand-piped flowers circles the scene. I love the look of pure concentration on my brother’s face as he tries to absorb every detail. Everyone around him is looking at the cake too. Sure, it might be his second birthday, but the cake… it takes the cake, really. You can’t help but stare at it. This is the unmistakeable work of my Grandma Fearnall.
        When it came to birthdays, there was no kidding around for Pat Fearnall: birthdays required cake, and cake was a serious business. There was a car cake for Gary’s sixteenth birthday, a tree planting- themed cake for Jodi, and a cake topped with a plastic man on skis to commemorate Bruce’s skiing accident. There were vanilla cakes covered in chocolate rosebuds, and chocolate cakes covered in M&M’s and colourful frills, and cakes covered with plastic balloons and plastic toys and a framed photograph of my aunt holding a satchel of saplings in the middle of Northern Ontario. My grandma could cement pretty much anything into a thick layer of icing. 
        It would probably be easier to see these famous cakes as emblems of my grandmother’s devotion to her family, but that over-simplifies things. My grandma was a woman of many layers. As a kid, I saw the talkative, sarcastic woman—the one with an affinity for hairspray, plum lipstick that left marks all over my cheeks, and a strong conviction that just one more cookie couldn’t hurt. More recently I learned about the woman who never quite found a way to be happy. The cakes were labours of love, but they were also the products of an intense perfectionism that ruled over her existence. My grandma wanted the kind of life one could only hope to find on the glossy pages of a magazine. Hidden in the frosting were unfulfilled ideas about what life was supposed to be like: bright colours, crisp lines, and lots of sweetness. When my grandma placed a cake in front of one of her children, she also presented them with her dreams. Do something big, the cakes seem to whisper, make me proud.
        Nonetheless, it’s the imperfections that make these cakes so special. What takes my breath away is how incredibly personal they are. The tiers aren’t quite tall enough, the frosting is a little too lumpy, and the designs are a bit too elaborate to look like something purchased from a bakery. Perfect is boring. The carefully piped borders occasionally reveal the smallest quiver, a reminder of the hand that piped them. These cakes didn’t get to be perfect, my grandma didn’t get to be perfect, and neither did the people she baked for. My grandma loved her family immensely; everything else was icing. I always wonder what her life might have been like if she could have seen that. My grandma made beautiful cakes and she raised beautiful people. But neither her cakes, nor the people who ate them, could ever make her life quite as beautiful as she wanted it to be.

        My lemon cake looks nothing like the one on the baking blog. Yet, when I place it in front of my grandfather, my aunt snaps a picture and my family reassures me that it’s perfect. It isn’t, but it tastes pretty good. Instead of focusing on the flaws, I think about my grandma and her empty seat at the table. I remember about the car, the skier, the trees, and Thomas the Tank Engine. And for a moment I can acknowledge that sometimes things are okay with a few extra crumbs.

LYNDSAY FEARNALL is a fourth year student at Huron University College where she is completing an Honours Specialization in English Language and Literature.