Crumb Cake and Coffee

May is the month when stationery shops abound with cards of pink and purple lined with lace and fringed with ribbon. Their muted tones are expected to evoke equally muted and pastel-like memories of life with Mother. The memories, however, while muted, are often not as saccharine as the cards. And sometimes, with the precision of an injection, pellets of recollection of childish resentments emerge that recall the moments of turmoil that must always exist in any parent-child relationship.

The tiny seeds of remembrance unleased by mundane items may, many mellow years later, be recalled with a smile and help us keep a proper perspective on the problems of our households today.

I suppose it was a community fund-raising drive that made me remember. The voice on the phone asked for my help, and requested I make a contribution of several of the "Marvelous crumb cakes you make."

"Marvelous crumb cakes" and I was suddenly whirled back in time to my own days of rebellion and feelings of being underprivileged. It was the Inaugural night for a Girl Scout Troop being organized at church. The meeting was at 7:30, and even in those days you didn't walk the city streets alone, especially if you were twelve years old. I knocked on the door of a classmate in the adjoining brownstone, and her Mother said, "You are just in time for some cake."

I saw the most beautiful sight I had ever seen, a six-inch chocolate layer cake that had been baked at home. Immediately, I realized I had been an underprivileged child. We had coffee cake and pound cake and raisin cake and marble cake, but never in my life had I seen such a cake as the one in the center of my friend's dinner table.

I was overwhelmed with the magnificence of the appearance of this incredible delicacy. I have no memory of how it tasted. I knew immediately, however, that "When I grew up," there would always be cakes such as this for my children. They would not be as deprived as I growing up in a household of coffee cakes and sweet rolls.

The years flew by quickly, and the family I had only dreamt about that night materialized, and the magic of raising a family made the time speed by at a dizzy pace. Until the other night, I had not remembered the layer cake, and my feelings of anguish at a Mother, who not only had no desire to bake preferring to read books, but also purchased only coffee cakes.

As I sat and thought about all the crumb cakes I have made in the years that have flown, I wondered why I had never achieved a reputation for frosted layer cakes or meringues or any of the other exotic treats that had revolved in my mind the night of the Girl Scout meeting.

Ambrosia comes in many forms, however, and my memories of home and Mother always seemed in later years to coincide with good crumb cake and fresh percolated coffee, a difficult combination to beat. My Mother firmly believed that crumb cake should be thick and fragrant and crusted with magnificent crumbs covered with a fragile lace of powdered sugar and bought in a bakery.

As a young bride, far from home, I had begun to look more kindly on both her beliefs and life style, when I found myself a tenant in the home of the First Prize Winner of the Ohio State Baking Contest. My young husband arrived home each evening to the fragrance of gourmet cooking floating out toward the driveway where he parked our car. His senses were assaulted as he bounded into the front hall, and they dissipated slowly as he climbed the stair and entered our studio apartment.

I will always remember the look of total despair that changed his expression from anticipation to dread as he surveyed our dinner, making me realize it was time for a radical change in my culinary habits. That is when I began baking two crumb cakes a week, and a family legend that has endured.

When the crumb cake was perfected, I truly intended to start working on the frosting for a perfect layer cake. But time intervened, and the crumb cake was never quite right. It is always a little too soft, a little too moist, and a little too rich to compete with any baker's.

Yet it will be the link that may evoke memories for my children of the home of their youth, as I recall a young, dark-haired woman carrying an armful of books and a bag of fragrant, freshly baked crumb buns walking on New York streets with her rebellious daughter.