Читать книгу Dear Prudence - David Trinidad - Страница 17

THE SYLVIA PLATH CAKE COOKBOOK

FOR CATHERINE BOWMAN

Today I made a Devil’s Food Cake for the first time.

Monday I baked a cake, vanilla, with lemon icing.

I had not made enough frosting to spread over the side of the cake to conceal the messy uneven edges, so I cut three pieces of the worstlooking part for our lunch.

Mrs. Watkins had taken my cakes carefully off the plate, washed and dried the plate, and handed it back to me.

There was a great frosted layer cake.

And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.

I am a pig and have three hunks of cake.

With one finger I nudged a cake crumb into a drop of wet, brown tea.

I was thinking of the few times in my life I have felt I was all alive, tensed, using everything in me: mind and body, instead of giving away little crumbs, lest the audience be glutted with too much plum-cake.

“Who made all the cakes?”

Mrs. Mayo was pouring sliced peaches and juice over a great plate of little white cakes.

There was a startling number of cakes, all painstakingly decorated, some with cherries and nuts and some with sugar lace.

Millions of needly glass cakes!

four kinds of fancy cake

a Schrafft’s cake for her maiden aunt

a package of pink-frosted cakes

coffee cake

pound cake

apple cake

tomato soup cake

a beautiful little two-layer 8 inch cake, yellow with 3 egg-yolks, and a maple syrup frosting with walnuts

a Gargantuan fantastical pink palace of a cake

a chocolate cake with white frosting

a yellow-frosted banana cake with cherries

yellow-browned round cakes

a three-tiered square cake

a lemon layer cake

a chocolate cake with rich dark frosting

inedible cream-filled cakes

delicious carrot cakes

maccaroon cakes that soften and cling to the hungry mouth

a plate of fancy tea cakes, all sugar & frosting

a plate of absolutely indigestible “Black Walnut flavored” cupcakes from a Betty Crocker mix

a glorious iced cake wrapped in her beautiful shawl

Meanwhile Prudence licks some frosting off the cake.

So I made and sugared some one-egg cupcakes.

I saw she had a handsome fruit cake, with one quarter cut out, on the table, cleared of tea things.

I had baked a big yellow sponge cake.

They ate cake; ate cake and catted about the Saturday night date.

All because of those revolting little cakes.

The model daughter fancily posed before a traditional wedding cake. A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.

While making a cake found she’d left out one ingredient.

“Cake mix.”

I want to eat my cake abroad and come home and find it securely on the doorstep if I still choose to accept it for the rest of my life.

What could frost my cake more?

And then the tale of the twenty-four cakes will come.