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Festive Cakes
Appears in
Published 2011
‘It’s fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat.’... Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why we’ll need a pony to pull the buggy home...Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory, 1956
Man is born to celebrate was my mother’s maxim. No event was too trivial or commonplace to warrant a special cake: learning to swim or ride a bike, the first melons or French beans from the garden, the arrival of friends, were all marked by a display of her baking talents. Astonishing birthday cakes were launched at our parties; decades before they became standard fare on supermarket shelves, my brothers and I enjoyed trains with trucks, cars with passengers, forts with soldiers, magic forests and princess castles, gleaming with icing and glowing with lit candles.