My Grandparents both passed away this last April. Their deaths were unexpected: Both were pretty healthy for being 80 years old, and had just returned from spending the winter with my parents in San Diego, which they’ve been doing every year for the last 15 years. My Grandma had a stroke one spring afternoon while out tending her garden, and a week later, my Grandpa passed away of a heart attack. It’s a blessing that neither of them suffered, that they didn’t have to endure years of failing health and illness, that they lived together in their home until the end, and that they were surrounded by family in the days and weeks before they passed. But these blessings come with the sadnesses of unanticipated loss: There are so many things I never got to ask them, never got to learn, never got to understand about their histories, and their lives together.
Like most people, a lot of my family memories revolve around shared meals and food: beer cheese soup and summer sausage sandwiches every Christmas Eve; baking pies with Grandma in the summer and anticipating the scraps of dough, baked with cinnamon and sugar, as a treat; watching Grandpa grind potatoes with his old hand-cranked grinder for his famous potato pancakes; dusting Grandma’s funnel cakes, fresh out of the fryer, with powdered sugar; spreading peanut butter and honey over fried bread dough and calling it dinner. And even though I have countless kitchen memories shared with them, when I came across my Grandma’s ring of faded and smudged recipe cards in her kitchen last spring, I realized how many more family stories there were to share that I am never going to know about. Grandma’s recipes were the only thing I really wanted when my aunts and uncles started cleaning out their house.
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