The Icing on the Cake (16 page)

“Liza, you're the guest of honor at a birthday party, not a funeral,” Nana says, fingering the soft, delicate (shine-free) fabric distrustfully, as though it might be covered in a layer of invisible slime.

“It's navy blue, Nana, not black,” I correct her. “And I like it so much better than any of the others. At least let me try it on.”

Nicole flashes Nana her best PS smile (she's obviously had a lot of practice). “We call this shade midnight blue, and it's a lovely compliment to Liza's mocha skin tones.”

I've never thought of my skin color as “mocha” before, but I sort of like it. It sounds a lot nicer than “light brown” or “dark tan,” which is how people usually describe me.

“So go ahead, try it on,” Nana shrugs. She lays on an overly dramatic, heavy sigh. “Far be it for me to stop you.”

As Nicole helps me out of the lavender frill-fest, I look over at Frankie and telepathically say “thank you.” I decide to focus on her thumbs-up and Lillian's encouraging smile rather than the annoyed look on Nana's face that I can see reflected in the mirror.

The perfect blue dress actually fits me perfectly too. Nicole straps my feet into a pair of pretty silver sandals that have just the right size heel—a “kitten heel” she calls it—and for a minute I really do feel like Cinderella.

Frankie and Lillian jump up and crowd around me in front of the mirror.

“Oh, Liza,” Lillian says, “you look so elegant!”

“You really do, Lize,” Frankie says, nodding. “It's just so . . . so totally you.”

She takes at least a hundred pictures with her phone as Nicole slowly turns me around so she can get a good look at me and the dress from all sides.

“I have to agree,” she says after I've made a full three-sixty rotation. “I think this might be the one.”

I take a long look at my reflection in the mirror—the midnight-blue dress, the kitten-heeled shoes, my mocha skin and corkscrew curls—and smile for probably the first time all afternoon. And then I look more carefully at Nana, who is definitely
not
smiling. She sighs, and I know what's coming next.

“I take my granddaughter shopping for a dress to celebrate her most important birthday, and she wants the one that makes her look like she's in mourning.”

I shake my head—I have to hold my ground. “Nana, come on. This is a beautiful dress.”

“A beautiful dress for a grown woman, maybe.” Nana shrugs.

“I thought you said turning thirteen means I
am
a woman.”

Nana takes my hand and gives me her best wounded look. “Liza dear, you're becoming a young woman—but you're still my little girl. There must be something else you tried on that you liked.”

I look from Frankie to Lillian to Nicole, hoping at least one of them can save me. I can tell they want to help, but what can they do? It's like my grandmother has cast a spell and everyone is suddenly powerless against her.

I gaze at myself in the midnight-blue dress for what I know will be the last time. “Um,” I say, my smile long gone, “I guess the pale green one was okay.”

Nana lights up. “The pale green was nice, but the lavender brought out the pink in your cheeks.” She turns to Nicole. “Don't you agree?”

Nicole shoots me an apologetic look, and then nods.

As my mom would say, Nana Silver strikes again.

Chef is clapping and waving his hands around, but I can't take my eyes off my mother. Who would have thought that the proud, stubborn, turn-up-her-nose-at-all-food-not-made-in-her-own-kitchen MeiYin Wong would be this person in front of me—smiling calmly on the outside, but totally excited on the inside about recipes that are as far from Chinese as they can be. According to Chef, we're baking cakes today. For our last class of the session (already?) he wants us to
“bake our little hearts out”—and my mother is ready, even though she's never even liked cake.

Today we line up at the long shiny tables where the Newlyweds are chatting about their wedding cake and Ms. Reynolds is going on about what she wants to bake for Liza's party. My mother is so interested that she doesn't notice me slowly moving away from her and closer to Frankie. Unfortunately, Javier is way on the other side of the table near Liza and her mom, but today is not about him. Instead I have to focus on coming up with a plan to rescue Liza's party with Frankie.

Chef has us start with a basic pound cake, which I'm guessing is named for the pounds of butter it seems to need—or the five eggs that must weigh at least a pound. All around the tables are little bowls (Chef calls them “ramekins”—which I think is such a cute word) filled with different things to add to our cakes. After we cream the butter and beat in the other ingredients in the giant red mixers, we get to decide
what flavors to add: nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger, colored sugar, or even poppy seeds. There are also bowls of lemons, oranges, limes, and grapefruits for us to “zest,” which Chef explains means to shave off tiny pieces of the peel, also called zest, to flavor the pound cake.

Everyone is mixing and matching, which is super fun, and the smell of the citrus fruits is incredible. I look over at my mother, who has somehow become queen of the add-ins and is advising everyone around her which combinations to try. If my hands weren't so sticky from zesting, I'd take a video and send it to my cousin Chloe. She'd never believe this was her Ayi MeiYin.

Frankie's far away from her mom today too, and I can tell she's relieved she doesn't have to watch out for Theresa's “accidents”—or clean up after them. Frankie's not near Tristan either, which is good news for me, since we have things to discuss. Weirdly, it seems like Frankie wants to talk about Liza too.

“Poor Liza,” she says as we pour our dough into loaf pans. “She's so miserable about the party, but everyone else can't stop talking about it.”

It's true—the whole cooking class seems really interested in the party. Maybe not Nana Silver–level interested, but our three mothers, the Newlyweds, Chef, Henry, and Errol are always coming up with suggestions for the food or the decorations or the music. Of course, now that I've seen Liza's grandmother in action, I realize that none of these opinions really matter. And at this point, Liza looks like she's ready to hide in the oven with the loaf pans just to get away from it all.

As we carefully carry our pound cakes to the oven, Chef asks Javier to help him clear away the ramekins so we can start on the next project: a layer cake. Apparently, you can make all kinds of crazy cakes with a simple layer cake recipe, and I get excited thinking about different shapes and icings and colors.

“
Mis amigos
, we can make a classic birthday cake,
with two or three levels and icing in between each one,” Chef explains. “Or imagine little tiny baby cakes baked in our ramekins for one person to savor all to himself,” he looks around the room and smiles, “or herself, of course.”

“We can dot them with little puffs of whipped cream or decorate with tiny icing flowers. We can make anything with layer cakes,
señoras, señoritas, y señores
—even delicious cupcakes or birthday cakes in the shape of a dinosaur or
un avión
—an airplane!”

Chef moves closer to Liza. “We can even make a cake for a fancy ball,” he says, winking at her. Liza forces a smile back, but I can tell she just wants to flee.

Everybody laughs at Chef Antonio's enthusiasm—I think maybe he's purposely being even more Chef-like than usual for our last class—and then starts grabbing whatever they need. Tristan and Javier tell us they're making a rectangle chocolate cake and decorating it like an iPod. I overhear Margo tell Liza they should make a big “thirteen” cake for her
party—Liza's too polite to say no, but I'm sure she'd rather be making just about anything else.

“Liza is definitely miserable,” I say as Frankie and I start mixing our ingredients. I feel a little guilty that we're paired up and Liza's across the table, but now seems like as good a time as any to bring up my idea. “We should do something to help her.”

Frankie rattles the flour sifter just a little too violently and powders herself with a fine pale dust. She shakes herself in a move that reminds me of her pug Rocco and scrunches up her nose. “But if her parents are powerless against Nana Silver, then what can we do?”

I'm trying to figure out how to make a kitten-shaped cake with pointed ears, but then I decide to keep it simple and try some baby cakes. I'm not sure exactly what they are, but the name couldn't be cuter. “Actually, I have an idea,” I say, pouring some batter into a ramekin. “What if we threw a more Liza-like not-mitzvah?”

She stops cracking eggs and stares at me. “You mean, like, hijack Nana Silver's party? I love your sense of adventure, but I'm not sure how we'd do that.”

Chef scoots by us, encouraging us to hurry along so we can get to the other goodies, and pauses when he gets to my mother.

“
Que lindo
, Mei Yin,” he says, and you can tell from his voice that he's genuinely impressed. “So light and fluffy. You are an expert at the batter!”

I can practically feel my mother beaming with pride, and I wonder if she's going to start baking cakes at home, too. For our birthdays, we have longevity noodles, which we get to slurp because its bad luck to cut them or bite them. Maybe she will add in a birthday cake, too? But right now it's time to focus on Liza's birthday.

“What if we somehow threw her the party that she would love, in a comfy, pretty place, with good music, and real-people food, and with everybody that
she actually likes?” I say. “We can't stop Nana Silver's party, but maybe we can throw her another one.”

Chef scoots along the table again, clapping and encouraging.

“Let's get these in the oven so we can start on the next batch,
mis estudiantes
. We will need to leave time for decorating, because that's where we can all go
loco
!”

Frankie pours her batter into a circular pan—she says she's going to cut it into a heart shape later—and hands it to Chef to put in the oven. “You mean . . . ,” she says, when he's definitely too far away to hear, “like an alterna-mitzvah?”

I nod. I guess that's exactly what I mean.

Frankie's eyes get bigger and bigger and she grabs me by the shoulders. “That's GENIUS!”

Henry and my mother look over at us, and I point to the clipboard with the recipe for our next assignment.

They look a little confused, but Henry smiles and
shrugs. “The girl is passionate about her pastry!” he says to my mother.

I want to talk more about the alterna-mitzvah, but Chef starts telling us about shortcake. “This humble little cake is a bit controversial,” he explains, “because some people think it should be more biscuit and less cake and some people like it more cake and less biscuit. We are going to make a
delicioso
version that combines the best of both. And since it's ‘shortcake,' let's keep it short,
mis amigos
, we have more goodies to make today!”

I look over at Javier, who is doing his best to bury his face under his mop of curls, until Tristan bops him on the head with his hat.

Frankie and I get back to making our plans as we follow Chef's instructions and cut up cold butter and start pinching it into the extra-light cake flour until it looks like grains of rice for our shortbread.

“I'm glad you think my idea is genius,” I say, “but it's totally useless unless we can figure out how to
make it happen.” We mix in the rest of our shortbread ingredients: flour, sugar, and buttermilk. “To throw a party Liza would like, we need food, music, a place . . .

We gather our dough into a ball, knead it a little with some more flour, and then form it into a rectangle so that we can cut out circles. Then I line my shortbreads up in tidy rows on the baking sheet.

“And we can't do anything that would hurt Nana Silver's feelings,” Frankie adds as we carry the cookies over to the oven.

The pound cakes are out, and most of them look golden and gorgeous—except for Frankie's mom's, which is flat and a little singed. I don't think Theresa has noticed yet, though, which is good. She always seems so sad when her things don't turn out right, and then she makes a joke out of it. I personally think her jokes are pretty funny, but they usually get on Frankie's nerves.

We have one last batch of cakes to make before
we start to decorate everything, and Chef Antonio tells us they're called
petit fours
, which means “small oven” in French. It seems to me that anything with a French name must be hard to make, but Chef tells us to have confidence.

“
Mis amigos
, remember that the key to pastries is in the batter. We just rearrange some ingredients, change the order a bit, and
voilà
, as the French say, we have a different confection altogether!”