The Wedding Cake Grandma and I Baked

Getting the pans down

She had me get the step stool and climb up into the cupboard over the refrigerator, and I came down with a stack of round aluminum pans so old the sides were dull gray. A six, two eights, two tens, and one twelve, with her initials scratched into the bottom of every one with a nail.

“The other twelve went to the church kitchen in 1996,” she said. “Call Linda Becker. She has a key.”

I called Linda Becker, who has run the funeral lunches at Our Savior’s for as long as I’ve been alive. She didn’t ask me a single question. She said, “I’ll leave it on the back step in twenty minutes,” and she did.

Then Grandma sat back down at the table with a pencil and the back of a feed store envelope and started writing a list.

“Your recipe makes two nine-inch layers,” she said, half to herself. “Four tiers, two layers each, that’s the same as about eight batches. Better make nine. Something always sticks.”

Nine batches. I did the math on my phone while she wrote.

Six egg whites a batch. Fifty-four eggs, plus extra for whatever went wrong. Five pounds of butter for the cake and another eight for the frosting. Twenty pounds of powdered sugar. Cake flour, more than any store in Pine Creek would have on a Thursday night.

“Call your father,” Grandma said.

My father

My dad, Jeff Lutz, drives a milk truck. Up at three-thirty every morning, picking up from dairies all over Dunn County, home by early afternoon. He goes to bed at eight like a farmer.

He picked up on the second ring.

“Grandma and I are baking my wedding cake tonight,” I said. “Can you go to the store?”

There was a pause. Then I heard him getting out of his recliner.

“Read me the list,” he said.

He didn’t ask why until he was already in the truck. When I told him, he was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “All right.” Only that. My father is not a talker.

But he drove to the Walmart in Menomonie and then to the Kwik Trip on the highway when Walmart ran short on butter, and he came back at nine-thirty with the bed of his pickup full of grocery bags, five dozen eggs, and a bag of cheese curds for us to eat.

“I’ll be up at three,” he said. “Call me if you need anything heavy lifted.” He kissed my grandmother on the top of her head, and he kissed me on the top of mine, and he went home to sleep four hours before his route.

My mother was working the night shift at the hospital in Eau Claire. She couldn’t trade it on a day’s notice. She called on her break at eleven and cried, and then she told me to make sure Grandma sat down every hour.

The first batch

Grandma’s recipe card was in a tin box on top of the refrigerator. It was written in blue fountain pen in her slanting school hand, and it was so stained with butter that the bottom third was nearly see-through.

White Almond Cake, Vera L. 1963.

“I made this for my sister’s wedding,” she said. “July, no air conditioning. The buttercream slid right off the side. It tasted fine. Nobody remembers how it looked.”

She showed me how she did it. Cake flour sifted twice. Butter and sugar beaten until it went pale, almost white. The egg whites added one at a time. Real almond extract and a little vanilla, and buttermilk, which I hadn’t expected.

“Buttermilk keeps it from going dry,” she said. “Bakery cakes go dry because they make them on Wednesday.”

She couldn’t stand at the counter long anymore. Her hips are bad, and her hands are worse. Her knuckles are swollen up like walnuts from the arthritis, and her fingers bend away to the side. So she sat at the table and told me what to do, and I did it.

The oven was the hard part. That 1958 range runs hot, about twenty-five degrees hotter than the dial says, and it runs hotter in the back left corner than anywhere else. Grandma knew it the way you know a horse.

“Three twenty-five on the dial means three fifty,” she said. “And turn the pan halfway through. Toward the window.”

The twelve-inch pan only fit in by itself, with the rack in the middle. The smaller ones I could do two at a time.

The first six-inch layer came out at seven-forty, golden on top and shrinking away from the sides of the pan, just like she said it would. I turned it out onto the wire rack and the kitchen filled up with the smell of almond and hot butter.