The year of cake
Coming back to France, the road to 40 and the best cake I've baked
Ahem, bonjour!
I hadn’t planned on a hiatus from this newsletter; in fact, you may remember I had set a goal of writing two posts in April, which I have felt guilty about no less than 10,000 times since writing that. But here’s what happened. Our planned summer trip to France turned into a spring and summer trip and now here I am writing in the living room of our pied-à-terre in the south of France, surrounded by boxes from our Paris storage unit.
This wasn’t exactly on our radar for the year, but our long term goal has always been to split the year between the US and France, which is why we stored a household of things in Paris when we moved to California two years ago. When circumstances at the end of winter made that goal reachable earlier than planned, we sprinted (rushed!) ahead so that we could arrive in France in time for a family wedding in April.
I’m not sure what the right mix of time in both places should look like, or if it’s even possible, so that’s the question that we’re mulling over. And then, I suppose not too far down the road (when Alma starts school), we will have to face the looming choice head on: where do we want to continuously spend a couple decades?
Whenever I tell Eric this he gently reminds me I don’t have to approach it so heavily. We can always change our mind and we probably will. We can always move or move back. Kids are flexible. “Look at how you turned out,” he says. (I went to 12 schools before college). These reminders are one of the reasons I married him, though I would argue 12 schools was a bit much.
In any case, all of this upheaval led to a chaotic but joyful spring. Chaotic because we ostensibly managed an international relocation with a not quite 1 year old and a dog. Joyful because we’re happy to be back in France after two years away. The minute I stepped off the airplane and felt the humid, non-refrigerated air of CDG, I felt like I was home. And this time, for the first time, I’m returning as a French citizen.
Now let’s talk about the fact that I turned 39 this month and Alma turned 1 a few weeks before that, which sent me into a tailspin. Not about getting older but about time moving so quickly. This past year tracked at a speed that I just can’t seem to process, no matter how hard I try. With it, whole parts of my life have shifted, gone dormant or come alive. I just wish it would go a little bit slower.
Growing up in Texas, I used to dread the slowness of summer. We were not a summer camp family and we never took a single summer vacation (my Dad is too second gen for these kinds of things), so June and July used to stretch before me like a hot abyss of nothingness. I passed time by counting the chipped tiles in our backyard as I slowly fused into an aspirational beach towel draped over piping hot concrete. My corner of Texas was so hot and so dull that no amount of Blue Bell mini country cones could make it better, though I did test the limits of that theory.
Of course, there were upsides of all this time. I wrote, directed and starred in one woman film shorts on the family camcorder. I recorded my thoughts on a tape recorder. I choreographed dances to Tori Amos and Annie Lennox. I filled yellow legal pads with stories. I know Jonathan Haidt would say this unstructured time did wonders for my brain and attention span. And I’m sure he’s right. But despite all my efforts, time went by as slow as molasses and I hated it.
My experience with time right now is the exact opposite. I pretty much always think it’s a day earlier than it is. Every night around 9pm I think it’s 1pm (partially due to the long summer days in Europe) and I flick through my mind trying to figure out where the day went. Later, when everyone is asleep, I scroll through my photo gallery, where photos from a month ago feel like they were taken in another lifetime. It’s mostly because I have a new tape measure in my life: Alma, and she’s growing so quickly. But it’s also the lightning speed at which life passes in periods of transition. I haven’t been in such a big transition in a long time.
Everything in my life has been in flux this past year. My identity as a parent, daughter and entrepreneur have all changed. Even my nationality, something usually fixed, has changed. And against the greater backdrop of a rapidly changing world, life careens forward. There’s no time to count chipped tiles. There’s no time to melt into asphalt or fill yellow legal pads. I barely have time to eat three square meals, let alone digest the fact that today is the first day of July. Or that I’m 39. Or that Alma is 1.
Another part of my post-birthday tailspin was triggered by this “piece of advice” that I keep receiving about enjoyment. I’ve had countless mostly, but not exclusively, older people, walk up to me and Alma in airports/restaurants/public restrooms/grocery store parking lots to tell me some version of “Enjoy her! It goes so fast!” If you’re in a similar algorithm to me, I’m sure you’ve seen that reel saying you only have little kids for 4 years and that it’s a peak experience and that if you miss it, it’s gone! And you can never get it back!! So DON’T MISS IT!!! Even after being with Alma nonstop for the last year, I still find myself slightly emotionally hijacked by this advice.
A few months ago, when I first arrived in France, I was on a packed local tram wearing Alma in her carrier when a woman kindly asked if I wanted her seat. I whispered no, thank you and did some bizarre sign language to signal the fact that the baby in my carrier was falling asleep. An older woman seated on the other side of the tram leaned over to confirm my choice, yes, it’s actually better for her to be upright so that the baby sleeps. And then she turned directly to me and whispered: She’s so beautiful. It’s been 70 years since I had my own babies and I’ve still never seen anything more beautiful than a new mom with her baby. Enjoy it. Every day they will change and it will happen so fast. And then they’re grown up. That’s the translation from French; her version was more poetic.
Needless to say, I white knuckled the grab handle in front of me to prevent myself from crying. I put my other hand on Alma’s little back to feel her breathing. She had, as anticipated, fallen deeply asleep. A year from now, I remember thinking, she won’t be falling asleep in her carrier like this anymore. She will never be this tiny again.
It’s a lot, this speed of growth and change: incredible and disorienting. I’ve spent most of my life jumping into new thing after new thing, happily, but I’m in the deep end now. Witnessing the pace of a newborn growing into a baby, and then a toddler, is jarring, even for me. But trying to “enjoy it” more feels a bit like trying to smile when you’ve hit g force: unproductive.
I can’t try to enjoy it more or somehow soak it up more. I’m in it every day, every moment. I can’t do more than that, and I certainly can’t slow down time. And for the record, not every moment is enjoyable. Enjoyment isn’t the point. The answer, at least for me, is just to remind myself: here I am. I’m doing my best to be present in every moment. That’s enough.
On a less existential note, let’s bring this home with some cake talk. My husband calls me Marseillaise which means I’m someone who speaks in hyperbole, but please believe me when I tell you this cake, Alma’s 1st birthday cake (one of them, I’ll explain), is the best thing I have ever baked.
Alma came down sick for the second time in her life the night before her 1st birthday, so we had to cancel her party the following morning and opted to just have cake in the afternoon. I was too busy literally nursing her back to health to bake as planned, so I negotiated with the bakery around the corner to dig out a fraisier (strawberry cake) from their freezer stash when I discovered that they were sold out of all their fresh cakes. This turned out to be a mistake, but I made up for it by baking birthday cakes all month long.
Before we get to the next cake I should mention that there was a modicum of drama over the frozen fraisier. Françoise, my MIL, insisted we could eat it, whacking the top layer loudly with a knife, each time saying, “Mais ouiiii!” Eric insisted “Non” we could not, ever, under any circumstance eat a frozen fraisier. I abstained from the conversation.
Next up is Françoise’s save-the-day strawberry clafoutis that we happily subbed in when we realized we could not actually slice into the fraisier.
Once Alma was feeling better a few days later, we had another birthday with the “baby friendly” banana and apple puree cake I had originally planned to make (no sugar, no dairy, no grain). Alma ate this one and loved it.
And now on to the best cake I’ve ever made. I researched this quite a bit and it turned out, which not all protracted baking projects do. As with most of my baking, it wasn’t perfect. And of course I will probably never be able to recreate it. I can’t even share a recipe. I wish I could.
What I can tell you is that I looked at different recipes and took elements from Ina Garten’s flag sheet cake recipe and Martha Stewart’s vanilla cake recipe. Then I adjusted the sugar and fat content quite a bit to my own liking (less sugar, more butter/cream) and voilà. Alma enjoyed blowing out her candle and ate strawberries while the adults enjoyed this one.
It would be fair to say I made this cake for my own birthday too, which falls two weeks after Alma’s. On my actual birthday this year I was in Arles, where I had a slice of fraisier (non-frozen, luckily) and a slice of forêt-noire cake, but all I really wanted was a good old fashioned American birthday cake. So this one hit the spot.
Françoise also surprised me with a gâteau de Savoie a few days after my birthday. This was a departure from the usual cherry clafoutis, but I didn’t mind one bit that the cakes continued. I’ve decided that 2025 is the year of cake - multiple birthday cakes for everyone, sick or not, milestone birthday or not! Life right now, at this speed, calls for extra cake.
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Hi! Thank you for continuing to read my sporadic, rambling newsletter. If you liked it, please consider leaving it a little heart at the bottom. I started writing this post in May, when spring was very much still in the air, but got sidetracked by everything you’ve just read. We’ve spent the last couple of months finding our rhythm and it is now JULY and most definitely summertime. At this exact moment we are in the middle of a heat dome situation in France so I’m eating my weight in melon and searching for a wider brim hat that doesn’t give Kentucky Derby. Please drop any hat suggestions below. Not to sound like a 90s yearbook, but I hope you have a great summer and that it is whatever you want or need it to be.
I love reading you, it is fresh and recreative like a good page of littérature or like a good birthday cake!
I legit LOL'd at the 90s yearbook reference. amazing letter, as usual. HAKAS!