The Icing on the Cake (8 page)

“
Bueno
, I'll stop now. You came here for a cooking class, not a chemistry lesson,
mi gente
!”

“You heard that, nephew?” Errol chuckles, looking over at Tristan from across the room. Embarrassed, Tristan pulls the ski cap he's been wearing all morning a little lower over his face. I am guessing he is not a fan of his chem class. Frankie stares at him as if yanking his hat down has somehow made him even cuter.

“Some people use food processors for the crust—you can try that at home,” Chef continues. “Here, we are going to do it the old-fashioned way so we can get our hands dirty.”

He tells us to dump the chopped-up chilled butter into our mixing bowls and add the flour. Then we pinch, pinch, pinch it until all of the little butter pellets are coated in white. Everyone is pretty focused for a while, and you can totally tell who's determined to get this right (Mom, Dr. Wong, Errol, and Margo) and who just wants to get it done (everyone else!).

Next we form balls of dough. Or some of us do—Frankie's mom, Theresa, is having trouble getting hers to come together.

“Don't worry if you still see little bits of butter,” my mom explains, “you really don't want to manhandle it, T.” She leans over to lend a hand, and I have to admit, in a few seconds Theresa's greasy lump actually looks like a ball of dough. Mom is really good at this.

Chef walks between all the tables, nodding happily. “Excellent. Now we chill the dough for a bit while we make the fillings. Here is where we go our separate ways for a while,
mis amigos
. Table One—I leave
you with Señora Jackie. Everybody else,
vamanos
!”

Mom takes a deep breath and grins at us. “I've never taught anybody before, except of course, my children,” she says, looking at me. I can tell she wants me to smile, but I'm still feeling weird about her suddenly being Chef's “special guest,” and I'm not in the mood. Henry gives me a look, but I ignore him, too.

“I've been thinking a lot about my granny's favorite recipes,” my mom goes on, “because Liza's got a big birthday party coming up in a few weeks, and I'm making all the desserts.”
No way
. Does someone have to bring up the party
everywhere
I go? This is just getting worse and worse. Everyone at the table smiles at me, but fortunately, Mom keeps going.

“I chose this one because it's delicious, simple”—she pauses while Theresa pumps her fist—“and distinctively Southern. Buttermilk pie.” She smiles. “To me, it tastes like unconditional love and comfort, so I hope you all think it's as delicious as I do!”

We gather our ingredients, which are pretty simple.
Eggs, butter, sugar, vanilla, buttermilk, flour. The next table is chopping apples for apple pie, and the graham-cracker folks are using a food processor—I guess Chef changed his mind, to keep the flying crumbs to a minimum—and melting butter. We measure and mix, using “rounded” tablespoons of flour. Mom explains that means instead of leveling off the top of the flour as we usually do, her grandmother would want us to let it heap over, or round, a little.

Theresa flings her flour all over the table as she works. “Oh, I love your grandmother, Jackie. You know, exactness really isn't my thing!”

I look over at Frankie to see if she heard her mom's understatement of the day, but she's completely focused on Tristan, as usual. “Smooth move!” she yells, punching him on the shoulder. I have no idea why, although it might have to do with the overflowing food processor that Tristan's trying to operate like it's a video game controller.

Chef brings us all our chilled balls of dough. “Let's
rock and roll,
amigos
!” he yells, handing out rolling pins to each table. Javier slumps farther down on his stool. I wonder if Chef tells those corny jokes just to make him squirm.

The two tables working with the regular dough (ours and the apple pie group) start dusting our work surfaces and rolling pins with flour. Then we start rolling. The table making graham-cracker crust presses their dough into shape in the pans instead of rolling it out. Chef gives us all pointers as he crushes some little limes in a fruit press.

“Slow and steady wins the race,” Mom tells our table as we roll out our dough—it's one of her favorite expressions. Dad says that's one way you can tell she's not a native New Yorker. “Just long, even strokes with the roller. Don't whack at it, Theresa—oh my . . .”

Frankie's mom is attacking her dough more than rolling it, and it's falling apart in ugly hunks. But the rest of us are making some pretty impressive-looking slabs of dough. As she shows us how to drape them
into the pans, my mom talks about cooking with her grandmother and how family occasions at Granny Fran's house meant tables piled high with homemade delicacies.

“That's why I'm excited to make the desserts for Liza's big day,” she says, “because it's what the women in my family have always done. I haven't had time for much baking lately, so I really want to do it up now!” Seriously? Not this again.

To discourage my mom from saying anything else about the party, I turn my attention to the apple-pie table, where Lillian is making the most beautiful top for her pie. Chef calls it lattice, and it looks like something from a magazine. The Newlyweds are making theirs together—Margo places her pie-crust strips one way, and then Stephen layers his on top of them, so that they crisscross over each other. Margo must have bionic ears or something, though, because as soon as my mom mentions the party again, she turns and looks right at us.

“That is such a wonderful idea, Jackie,” she says in her perpetually blissed-out, breathless way. I wonder if she talked like that before she and Stephen got together. “I had a big Sweet Sixteen party, and it was so lovely. There was a pink balloon tower and a disco ball.” She literally sighs as she remembers it, I am not kidding. “But no one in my family is a baker, so my mom just ordered one of those big tacky cakes from the grocery store. The cake decorators even spelled my name wrong. Your plan sounds so much more personal!”

We're crimping the edges of our piecrusts now, and I'm glad to have something to focus on other than party talk. I'm using a fork like Mom told us to, but Theresa has given up and is basically just shaping her crust into the pan with her knuckles. Mom tries to show her how to rub a little water into the dough to fix all the holes and tears, but Theresa just grabs little pieces of dough and smooshes them over the problems.

“I loved my Sweet Sixteen.” Theresa sighs as she attempts to sloppily patch another hole. “I danced with Joe all night. I'm sure Mama and Nonna cooked up a storm for the party, but I don't even remember the food. At the time it was the most romantic night of my life . . .” She actually starts humming that song from The
Sound of Music
about being sixteen going on seventeen.

Okay, hold up. I'm turning thirteen, not sixteen, and I'm definitely not looking for a magical night of romance. Unlike my two best friends, I don't even have a crush! Suddenly everyone is reminiscing about their favorite birthday bashes—Errol's sister had one, Henry's cousin, even Dr. Wong has some stories about parties back in San Francisco. Lillian and Frankie shoot me sympathetic looks, but they're as powerless as I am against the birthday brigade. . . .

At last there's a distraction as Angelica carries Cole over to one of the giant refrigerators to get him some juice. While she's pouring, he runs to our
table and begs Mom for some dough (when she does bake, she always gives him some pieces to play with). My brother's like a frisky puppy, and everyone seems to want to give him little scraps. Some he balls up in his hand, but he eats quite a bit of it too. I don't blame him—raw dough is delicious, even though you're not supposed to eat uncooked eggs and all that. Angelica stops to admire Lillian's handiwork and then catches on to what everyone is talking about.

“A party?
Que bueno!
I just had the one son, but I always wanted to plan a
quinceañera.
 . . . In Cuba we celebrate the girl's fifteenth birthday, not the sixteenth, you know. It's a night to remember, and I wished always to give one.” She scoops up Cole and spins him around like he's Prince Charming, which makes him bubble with laughter as always. Chef steps around them as he circles the tables and pretends to look hurt.

“Sorry, Mami, that I was not a little girl for you.
Maybe we can dress up Javi for his
quinceañera
and pretend? Ha!”

Okay, well at least now there's officially someone in the room more horrified than I am. But why is Javier over there chuckling with Tristan instead of burying himself in his hoodie? Boy bonding? Where are my BFFs when I need them?

I spin around to find Lillian alternately obsessing over her perfect lattice and sneaking looks at Javier. At the graham-cracker table, Frankie's pouring key-lime filling into the crust while Tristan holds the pan. She's trying to gaze into his eyes, but he is more interested in scanning the table for crumbs and tossing them into his mouth. Meanwhile, Frankie's not even using a spoon to scrape up the leftover filling, which is totally unlike her. Something is definitely up with Frankie.

Mom puts the last of our buttermilk pies into the big ovens, and when she turns around I see that she has a flour smudge on the tip of her nose. Before I
can tell her, Chef Antonio swoops over and dusts it off with his oven mitt. They both laugh, but I'm not amused. First, the party I'm not in the least bit excited about takes over our Saturday cooking club, and now my mom and Chef are acting weird. The only good thing about this stupid not-mitzvah is that my parents are starting to like each other again. Our handsome, charming TV star Chef had better not get in the way. . . .

My dad sent me to the vegetable stand on Court Street to get a whole bunch of different-colored peppers and some onions. Of course, thanks to Chef Antonio and the cooking class, I now know that peppers are actually fruit, not veggies, but I'm not about to tell Mr. Pak that he should change the name of his stand. I love that Dad trusts me to pick out the best ones—he's super choosy about his ingredients and usually spends way too much time studying, squeezing, and
sniffing the merchandise at Mr. Pak's. But today is Sunday and he's trying to crank out a mess of dinners for the week, since he'll be on duty at the firehouse until eight or nine almost every night. I like to go to the vegetable stand and do my best Joe Caputo impression, inspecting the vegetables for perfection. I like to think I can spot perfection pretty easily—it's one of my talents.

My dad dedicating an entire day to cooking for the week spares us the ordeal of Mom making dinner. True fact: She's not as bad as she used to be. But when you're talking about my mom, that doesn't mean much. The cooking class has helped a bit, I have to admit. Most things she tries these days are pretty much cooked all the way through—a big improvement—and she
might
not hurt herself every single time. Still, she's not the greatest at following a recipe, she hasn't exactly perfected her technique when it comes to slicing and dicing, and she's not what you'd call “relaxed” in the kitchen—she bangs pots and
pans and swears (under her breath), which makes it all the more difficult to enjoy the . . . somewhat edible . . . results. Soooo, we all do whatever we can to help Dad stockpile.

When my dad cooks, the house smells amazing, and he just totally gets into this zone. It sounds weird, but it's actually a great time to talk to him because he's so focused on what he's doing, it's like his mind is free to think about other things. So, on his marathon cooking days, I usually end up hanging out in the kitchen, playing sous-chef to Dad, and chatting about stuff. Today, however, I'm not feeling the urge to help him layer pasta or sauté onions and garlic or roast chickens. None of it sounds very appealing. Even picking and choosing the vegetables (or fruit, to be exact) like a judge on
The Voice
didn't cheer me up. On my way home I trudge past all the same sturdy brownstones I've seen all my life, toward the spikes of the black iron fence in front of our house, and all of the bikes, scooters, and skateboards locked
to its spindles. Stepping over huge muddy puddles left over from yesterday's rain, I already know exactly what will happen when I open the door. The Goons will be crashing through the house, shaking the walls and floors with their stomping and bellowing (no matter how much Mom begs them to “use your inside voices”). Nicky will be playing Ancient Heroes without paying attention to where he's going and will knock something over with a sword or a shield or, more likely, both. Our house, as usual, will be entirely
feng shui
free.

Still feeling weird, I take Dad his ingredients. He's blasting some radio station that's playing All Eighties Music All the Time and tries to get me to dance with him. Um, no. Not today. Nicky bursts in and says he needs aluminum foil to make silver wings for his shoes like the Greek god Hermes, so while Dad digs around for the foil, I decide to take cover in my room.