Mmmmm. My home fills with the mingled scents of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and nutmeg, all baking together in a two-layer spice cake I’m making for Grandma C-s birthday, which just so happens to be on Thanksgiving this year. It will be topped with a maple meringue frosting--woah! Tomorrow morning I’ll stop at the local maple sugar bush to buy the syrup for the aforementioned frosting AND for the maple pecan pie I’m making for Thanksgiving.
Something about the smell of the cake reminds me of my Great-Grandma V-, who my brother dubbed “cookie grandma” when he was a wee lad. I don’t specifically remember her baking anything with these spice flavors, but she must have. She was a great baker, and I have her sugar cookie recipe (which is nice because it uses brown sugar and is a drop cookie rather than a rolled cookie). We would drive to her house every Sunday around 11:30 or so, after church if we had gone, or we would ride our bikes since she lived just down the road. Different cousins would be there every week, but we would always have home baked treats, Koolaid for the kids, and coffee for the adults. She kept a jar of pink things (as wee little L- used to call them), pink peppermints. I can taste them now...
I just removed the cake from the oven and am a bit concerned because the layers seem quite dense, more bread-like than cake-like. Hmmm. The adventures of trying a new recipe...
Today I bundled up and ran 3.5 miles, soaking up the sunshine for the brief time it made a definitive appearance today. Once I start running, the cold doesn’t really bother me, but those first few tenths-of-a-mile are a bit brutal. No one else was out today, which made me feel brazen (or crazy, as the case may be).
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