As promised in yesterday’s post, I’ve put together the recipe for the triple layer lemony cake that I renamed “Forgiveness Cake”.  But just before I share that, I have to tell you about the wonderful gifts I received yesterday.  And all from people that I don’t know personally.  Or as society would call them “strangers”. Though funny enough these strangers didn’t seem strange to me at all.  In fact they showed more kindness than some people close to me have.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, for my mom’s birthday I decide to make her a birthday cake and then take it to where a group of homeless people congregate.  I was a bit apprehensive when I went there.  I didn’t bring a purse, and only had my phone, my big tupperware case with the cake, and a bag with a cake knife, napkins and matches to light the candles.

I walked up to two girls in a large crowd. They were maybe in their late teens or early twenties (I’m not the best at gauging ages) and I introduced myself.  I explained that I had baked this cake and wondered if they would like to share it with me in honor of my mom’s birthday. They looked at me kinda funny at first.  Like who is this lady with the American accent and a giant plastic case (because at that juncture you couldn’t see the cake inside) babbling on about her mum.  Finally, I set down the case on the bench and opened it up and their faces totally changed.  They saw I had written on the cake “Happy Birthday Mom” and they could smell that amazing smell you get from a freshly baked treat.  Literally, all the people who had been milling about started to come over and I sensed they were getting excited.  Then one of the girls explained to the others what was going on and said “Let’s help her celebrate her mum’s birthday”.

With maybe 15 people gathered around I tried to light the candles.  I was a bit nervous and my hands were shaking, so I was having trouble with the matches.  Then this man, who I heard someone call him Keith, came over and said, “Here let me help”.  He whipped out his lighter and began helping me light the candles.  And once I started singing the birthday song, they all joined in and sang with me.  It was actually surreal.  But it felt really good.  When I blew out the candles I actually started to cry.  Two people, I didn’t see their faces as mine was buried in my hands, touched my shoulders, one on each side.  I could hear their voices, one was a man and one a lady.  They said, “There, there, come on now, you’re gonna be okay.”

Once I began to slice up the cake I felt better.  Then I really felt great when people reacted to  the taste of it.   One older lady said it was the best cake she had ever eaten.  There was a young teenage boy there and he came back a third time!  The cake was nearly gone at that stage.  He said he thought it was gorgeous and he absolutely loved it.  I saw myself in him!  Then I noticed he took the third piece to the end of the long bench and gave it to a very worn down looking woman.  She reminded me of my mom.  And the girl who I first approached saw me watching and she said, “That’s his mum.”  I realized that even if this kid is in a bad situation, he still loves his mom and will want to do things for her.

I thought back to when I was a kid.  And in spite of the hell we lived in, I tried my best to help my mom and do things for her.  For instance, when checks would arrive in the mail for the commercials that I worked on I remember saying to her, “Why don’t you take this check for yourself”.  I told her, “If it weren’t for you driving me to the auditions I wouldn’t be in commercials.”  She would take them now and again.  But mostly she would say, “No this is yours and it’s all going into a trust account for you to have when you’re grown up.”  From the bottom of my heart, I honestly don’t care about the fact that there never was an account.  Money is money, it comes and goes.  But a person’s word and their integrity is more powerful.  I just wished she had used the money to help our family’s situation and not on her drug habit.

As I watched this boy, who was introduced to me as Tyrone,  give her the cake,  I knew he was just doing what most kids do no matter their situation.  He wanted to please his mom.  All the other people there seemed to know him well and teased him about his sweet tooth.  There were old people and young, black and white.  And they almost seemed like a family, in that they all knew each other and seemed to look out for one another.  I have to say I really enjoyed eating my slice of cake with all of them.  The two girls I first approached, Nina and Maryanne kept asking, “Are you alright luv?”  I felt very comfortable, like a 180 from the moment I first walked up to them.  I could have stayed longer, but decided I should go.  I thanked them all and got a few hugs as they sent me off  with *one small piece of cake left in the case.  It was much lighter carrying it home.  But that wasn’t all that felt lighter.

Yesterday I had stayed off snapchat all day except an early morning snap (text) to those that follow me saying that though I was baking I was going to be silent because of the “day that was in it”.  I suggested people might read my blog to explain.  I had trouble going to sleep last night with so many things on my mind about the day.  Going to mass, baking the cake, having an impromptu party….and then I decided to check my snapchat.   I had all these messages waiting from people that follow me.  Total “strangers” if you will.  Yes, they see my snapchat stories and I theirs, but we haven’t met in person, nor do we have a relationship outside of this social media realm. Yet the most amazingly kind and supportive words were written to me.  Even encouraging me and thanking me for bringing joy into their lives with my wacky baking tutorials.

It struck me that this “kindness of strangers” bit is really the Gospel story of the “Good Samaritan” but it’s happening here and now.  And I feel so utterly grateful!  I once read a newspaper quote by a homeless person that said what they don’t need is another brown bag sandwich dropped off to them from the “do gooders”.  What they need is someone to talk to them and show them a bit of love to help make them feel human.  I hope this cake, made with the secret invisible ingredient, LOVE, can help us all feel a bit more human!

 Triple Layer Lemony Cake

For the cake:

1 cup (1/2 lb) unsalted butter softened

2 cups (450g) caster sugar

4 eggs room temperature

3 cups plain flour, sifted

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 cup whole milk

2 Tbsp lemon zest

2 Tbsp lemon juice

For the icing:

1 cup icing sugar

2 Tbsp lemon juice

For the filling:

1 jar of Lemon Curd

For the frosting:

500 g icing sugar

160 g unsalted butter, room temperature

4 Tbsp lemon zest

50 ml whole milk

1. Preheat oven to 180 C/350F/Gas mark 4

2. In a large bowl of an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar until creamy and fluffy about 3-5 mins; add the eggs one at a time beating 1 minute after each addition and scrapping down sides of bowl in between.

3. Meanwhile in a separate bowl combine flour, baking soda and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the creamed mixture, alternating with the milk. Mix until all is integrated and then add the lemon zest and lemon juice. Beat for 30 seconds.

4. Fill prepared baking tins and bake until done about 20 mins, when toothpick inserted comes out clean (12 mins if making cupcakes). Put on a rack to cool in the tins. While still warm pour a mixture of 1 cup icing sugar that has been mixed with 2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice on top of cake and poke holes in cake with a toothpick so the icing can be absorbed.

5. Once the cakes have totally cooled fill with lemon curd (if making a layered cake spread in between layers).

6. To make the frosting, beat together the icing sugar, butter and lemon zest (you can also add some yellow food coloring if you desire) until it has come together and is well mixed. Turn down speed and slowly pour in milk, when incorporated turn up speed again and beat until light and fluffy, about 5 mins. Then spread on cake and put sprinkles on the sides of the cake for decoration.

I was happy as usual this morning.  A new day, a new opportunity to love more, and make the most of this precious life.  I was back on snapchat with my bad singing, bad dancing, but  good recipes. Today  I made a peanut butter ice cream sambo!  Haha , auto correct just tried to change the sambo to samba. That’s a dance move.  Even with my dance naiveté I know that!

Thanks for all the kindness,

YDP

*ps. I wrapped up the one last piece of Forgiveness Cake and put it in the freezer.  Maybe if my mom is still alive, and if I ever find her, I can share it with her!

For the past twenty five years this day, October 19th, has begun the same way.  I usually get a call, text or email from my aunt saying, “A moment of silence.”  You see, today is my mom’s birthday.  And yet since her disappearance in 1990 we don’t really celebrate this day, but we have to recognize it in some way.  So that is what we do, we have a moment of silence.

Though my mom never liked to tell her age, we do know that she was born in 1938.  So she would have been (or maybe is) seventy seven years old.  Birthdays were never a big deal in our family.  We never had cakes or parties.  However, the only picture I have of my mom, strangely enough,  was taken on my younger half sister’s birthday.  And the only reason we have that photo at all is because my aunt bought the cake for her and took this picture.   That is my Grandpa O’Neill and my Uncle Ang (my aunt’s husband) in the pic too.  And my mom sporting a freshly bleached hairdo (thanks to my non beauty school skills).

The buzz word the last decade or so in the mental health and wellness world is “abandonment”.  Frankly, I can’t say I’ve actually felt that with regard to my mom.  In order to feel abandoned you have to have felt an attachment to start with, no?  As I have said before, I don’t think my mom was actually connected to any of us kids.  So when she left that one morning and told my then teenage half sister that she was going to walk to the store to get cigarettes, but never returned, we didn’t panic.  She would go on little sabbaticals (as we called them) from time to time.  And she would return.  Though this time she never did.  My sister put in a missing person’s report with the police department.  And apart from a couple of “Jane Doe” non matches with dental records, there were never any leads as to her whereabouts.  Even in today’s internet age, where you can find practically anyone with a Google search, there is no trace of her.

So  without closure, not knowing if someone is still alive or not, how do you mark the date they came into the world?  My Hubby is always in shock at how my siblings and I have dealt with this unanswered question in our lives.  He says, “She is your mom, and you came through her body, why don’t you go looking for her?”  He never met her so it is hard to explain.  But for the first few years after she left, to be quite honest, we actually had a sense of relief.  No more drama!  The havoc that she reeked in our lives was absent and we kinda liked the silence.  But then of course you do start to wonder, okay, if that was me, would I want people to be looking of me?   My aunt and I did go to the Social Security office to see if we could get some answers.  Since my mom would surely be collecting money, we could find out something.  But in fact she hadn’t collected any of the money due to her.  So what was she doing?  Don’t you think as her daughter I might feel in my soul if she had passed from this earth?

I then began looking around at homeless people and wondering what if she was one of them?  What if she just decided to check out of reality and live freely on the streets?  She could take her drugs to her heart’s content and not have any responsibilities.  But on the other hand I thought about her intelligence and maybe, just maybe, she actually decided to get on the straight and narrow.  On the day I graduated from U.S.C. celebrating with my own grown kids, something occurred to me.  What if my mom actually went to college after all and became, say, an attorney, and is now working in a successful law firm?

Still it is all conjecture and nothing to hold on to except the memories.  As you have read thus far on this YDP blog, not many of the memories of her are in fact good.  Sure I could be hurt about the abuse and neglect, the lack of love and respect.  I could be resentful about the fact that she spent all the money I made doing television commercials as a child on her drug habit.  I could be angry that she allowed our home to be an environment where nefarious characters repeatedly stole my innocence away in the dark of night.  But what upsets me the most is that she not only kept me from my father after their divorce, but she blatantly lied and said he didn’t pay child support.  I only discovered the truth after he passed away.  I was helping my stepmother clear out his office and found all the cancelled checks.  For years he sent her the money and she cashed the checks.  I saw with my own eyes her signature endorsed on the back of each check.  And I thought why would someone do that?

These things I have tried to explain to my Hubby but he always goes back to, “But she’s your mom”.  This morning he noticed I was deep in thought.  I told him what today was and he said, “You’re gonna be good to her aren’t you?”  since he knew I had to write a post about this day.  He takes the Irish stance, “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”  I get that.  Yet, I don’t know if she is in fact dead.  One of my brothers (the one who was a priest for a day) likes to say, “Mom just lost her way.”  That kinda covers two things, one that she left to buy cigarettes and without a GPS literally got lost.  And the second being that there was nothing malicoius in her behavior.  She went off the rails of normalcy long ago and that just happens to people sometimes.

So here is what I plan to do.  I will go to mass as I have before on this day and light a candle and pray for her, wherever she is.  I will find and focus on a memory of her that is positive.  She was, I feel, proud of the fact that I was in gifted classes in school.  Once when I was in high school she saw the good grades on my report card and bought a little second hand sweater vest for me as a reward.  At the time I remember what a big deal it was, even if from a thrift store, since she never gave us surprises.  She was (is) intelligent and though she might not have been able to channel hers in a productive way, maybe she would have been happy I used my intellect and went to college and graduated with honors.  And I do hope she would be relieved that I was able to break the cycle of abuse and raise my kids in a healthy and loving environment.  Never ever having to go without, nor scared of monsters.  Not the make believe ones under the bed, but the live ones walking around the house.  Sure their upbringing wasn’t perfect, as nothing is.  But it was one in which the chains of  darkness no longer existed.

My son, though only thirty, has come up with some pretty wise words in his lifetime.  One of the best lines was when our family was going through a most difficult time.  During his father and my divorce he said to me, “Mom I didn’t ask to get born” to which I replied, “Come to think of it, I don’t think I did either.” Today I will take that another step further and say I don’t think my mom asked to get born either.  Yet I am glad she was, so that she gave birth to me and I to my kids.  Life is strange, and yet beautiful in all its ups and downs.  I pray my mom is at peace, wherever she is.  And so to help me deal with the enormity of this day, I decided to deal with it the way I know how to deal with things best.  I’m gonna get in the kitchen and start cooking!

Since we never really celebrated birthdays, I thought, why not bake my mom a birthday cake?  And  then I am going to go share it with a group of homeless people I have encountered not far from the church.   I can’t change the past and there is no certainty of the future.  But for today, this moment, I am going to use a very simple but profound recipe.

Forgiveness Cake

Ingredients:

An open and willing heart

Instructions:

Just let go

Serves:

All of us

This delicious triple layer lemony cake is another version of “when life gives you lemons make…” and even though my mom wasn’t a baker,  I think she would have approved.  Since we’ve all heard of a humble pie, why not a forgiveness cake?   I’ll post the actual detailed baking recipe for this another day.  But for today, try out this forgiveness recipe too.  I think you might find it has a very memorable flavor!

With forgiving love,

YDP

As I have shared here before, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  And it is getting closer my friends!  So to get in the mood, I am pulling out every pumpkin recipe in my arsenal.

I normally make a big brunch for my Hubby and myself on the weekend.  Truth be told, I don’t have to wait until autumn to make these pumpkin pancakes.  They are so delicious and nutritious that I make them all year long.  They are the one flour containing pancake recipe that doesn’t leave you with the “too full tummy” feeling after you’ve devoured them.

If you can find tinned/canned pure pumpkin you are in luck.  However, some stores on this side of the pond don’t carry it.  So you could always use fresh pumpkin, roasted and then pureed.  Or substitute sweet potatoes just as easily.

You’ll find that these are so moreish that you will want to make up a larger batch and then freeze some of the pancakes so you can have them throughout the week.  With some crushed pecans and a drizzle of maple syrup I can’t think of a better way to start the day!  And with the totally cool hack (handy kitchen tip) you can make them even quicker by using a turkey baster. Yep, that’s right, just to get you in the mood for basting your turkey in a little over a month.  I mean, why should you only use that kitchen gadget once a year?!

Pumpkin Pancakes

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (190 g)

2 tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 and 1/4 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice (if you can’t find it in the spice section of the grocery store you can combine ground 1/2 tsp each of cinnamon and ginger with 1/8 tsp each of ground nutmeg and cloves)

1 cup/8 oz whole milk (or you can substitute with soy/almond milk  if you are dairy intolerant)

6 tablespoons canned pumpkin puree (100g)

2 tablespoons melted butter

1 egg

Sift and whisk dry ingredients together in a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, stir together wet ingredients.  Once combined, fold wet mixture into dry ingredients.  Heat a large pan over medium high heat and melt a bit of butter.  Using a turkey baster squeeze up about a 1/4 cup of the batter and squirt into discs into the pan . Cook for about 2-3  minutes, until the center starts to bubble and the sides start to get firm, then flip.  Cook for an additional 2 minutes or until pancake is heated through.  Repeat with the rest of the batter. Makes approximately  10.  Serve with crushed pecans and maple syrup.

Though I don’t have anything against going to a fab brunch restaurant, by the time you get in your car, drive, park and then wait to be seated and served, you could have seriously had a smack down breakie in the comfort of your own home.  And since I have some not so great memories of going to a restaurant with my mom for a ‘not breakfast’, I kinda opt for doing the cooking myself.

The story goes that she had to meet a friend, another nefarious one like her rainbow friends that had a strange name.  His name was Bob Scheme.  And she brought my brother and me with her to the restaurant.  As per usual she had no money.  So she told us kids that we had to just sit there and be quiet.  And the only time she said we were allowed to talk was when the waitress arrived to take our order.  We were instructed to say “thanks anyway but we are not hungry”.   The truth is, we were starving!   I’m still not sure what business transaction (or scheme) went down with her friend.  But I still remember the sound of my tummy grumbling and the smell of the food coming from the restaurant kitchen.  I thought to myself, how lucky those people were who worked as chefs, as they probably got to taste some of the food that went out to the customers.  You know, quality control.  And that might have been the ‘a-ha’ moment in my soul, even if I didn’t recognize it at the time, that I would end up in the culinary industry.  Never having to be without food again and certainly never having to say, “no thanks I’m a not hungry” if in fact I was.

So I hope a few of my little stories give you an insight into why Thanksgiving is so important to me.  But the truth is every day is thanksgiving for me. And for one I am grateful you are here sharing all these YDP moments with me!  Now go ahead and make some of these amazing pumpkin pancakes!  You will be thanking me!  And today my friends, Hubby did a bit of filming for the Yankee Doodle Paddy Youtube Channel.  So before long you too can see these Weekend Wonders being demoed just for you.

Full of appreciation,

YDP

P.S here is a you tube cooking tutorial for the pumpkin pancakes. The recipe is straight forward but if you want to see some bad singing and dancing you might want to check it out! LOL!