German Cake

German Cake 

By Ross Walker

No one knew why we called the biscuits that Gran made once a week and kept in a big tartan biscuit tin, German Cake.

For one thing, they weren’t cakes. Not according to the universally accepted theory that biscuits were crunchy when fresh and soft when stale. Cakes were the opposite, Soft and moist when fresh, hard and dry when stale. 

When fresh, German cake had a blissful bite to them and the moment a morsel separated from the main body it crumbled on the tongue

Second, German cakes were not German, or at least as far as I could tell. In the years since Gran passed, I have researched online and in history books for any Germanic cake or cookie that resembles the sweet, buttery, spicy treats I shovelled into my mouth two at a time, every Sunday after dinner. I have found none.

Last, it was German Cake, not German Cakes. No matter how many you were planning on scoffing, it was always, “pass me the German Cake please” or “can I have some German Cake please?” Never, “may I have two german cakes please?” Never.

Manners where always important to Gran. She was an ardent defender of the use of please and thank you, excuse me, if you were interrupting anything or I beg your pardon, when you burped or farted. 

The sub genre of table manners were equally important to Gran. Every Sunday we would drive the forty-five minutes through country lanes to her cottage and she would cook up a giant Sunday roast with all the trimmings.

Grandad, when he was alive, always served first to Gran, who sat to his left, always to the left, unless there was a special guest. Then he would proceed around the table serving a healthy dollop of each item on to everyone’s plate. First Dad, then Mum, then Jessica, Russell and ending with me. Being last didn’t mean I got leftovers, quite the opposite. There was always a slab of meat, a huge serving of mash or plenty of gravy to fill my plate. If it even looked like Grandad was being too heavy-handed, Gran would always say, in her rough but still sweet Scottish accent,” save some for the wee one.”

The other upside of being last in the pecking order was that it meant I sat next to Grandad and opposite Gran. She would always wink at me if I said something clever or stop the entire conversation so she could explain to me something that might have gone over my head.

After dinner, when everyone lent back in their chairs, stuffed to the gills with chicken, gammon, potatoes and carrots, Gran would stand up with a grunt and walk to the cupboard above the fridge, reach up and take down the huge tin. 

She would place the tin in the centre of the table and take the lid off. In my head, this moment is always cartoony. Wisps of delicious aroma would snake out of the tin and wiggle their way to us and shoot up our nostrils, almost lifting us off our chairs. Everyone would sigh at the pleasant aroma, then Gran would say, “Who would like some German Cake?”

This time she served, starting with Grandad then me, taking a second to fish out two sizeable pieces, then passing to me with a wink and a big wrinkly smile.

Sunday dinners became less frequent when Grandad died. By that time, I was in my twenties, but still she rummaged in that old tin looking for the two biggest pieces. After the old man passed, we only had one more. 

Grandad was a coal merchant. He would get up at five o’clock every morning, walk out to the coal yard behind the cottage and call for Tweedy, a shaggy Collie cross with hair that required cutting once a month or it would cover his eyes. Grandad performed this task with a pair of antique sheep shears.

Tweedy would run to greet him with the love that only dogs appeared to feel. He would follow Grandad around as he loaded to the truck bed with huge sacks of coal, each a hundredweight which was fifty-one kilograms. Despite his age, he was sixty-five when he retired. He would lift those sacks off the ground with a strength his wiry frame never betrayed and hefted them onto the truck bed. Loading completed, Tweedy jumped into the cab of the old green truck and they would take off to deliver to every house in the surrounding villages. After his rounds he would come into the kitchen, face smeared with black streaks of coal dust. Next to the sink, two large tubs sat, one filled with detergent, the other with sand. Grandad plunged one hand into each tub, pulling out handfuls of each substance, then rubbed them together until it was a gritted bubbly hand wash. Once rinsed, he dried his hands on an old shabby tea towel and held them up for inspection by the boss. Gran nodded that satisfied his hands were clean. He took her cheeks in his rough calloused paws, clean but still with dark lines that all the scrubbing would never remove, and kissed her tenderly.

"how was your day my darling Jeanie," he said

This he did for over fifty years. The only changes in all that time were the waning number of his clientele towards the end, as many of them switched to gas, and the dog. He had dozens through the years. But Tweedy is the only one I remembered. He died not long before the old guy retired. One time, he and Tweedy were making the daily rounds when some idiot swerved in front of the truck. Grandad slammed the breaks, sending poor Tweedy headfirst into the windshield. He didn’t die then; he lived for a good long while, but the traumas caused him to have seizures that got worse. 

One morning Grandad took Tweedy to the Vet. He took him in the coal truck, even though he had a car. He thought it would be nice for Tweedy to have one last ride. 

Grandad lasted five years after he retired. Maybe it was the lack of routine or the wear of decades of carrying hundred weight of coal every day. Almost immediately, he withered. His slim frame no longer had a hidden strength, it was frail and prone to illness.

The end came by a heart attack one morning. Gran found him.

She lasted six months after Grandad died. Six months to the day. 

Of all the Sunday dinners we had, the first one after Grandad died, which was also the last, sticks in my mind like warm toffee.

Gran cooked in silence, which was an anomaly. Cooking at Gran’s was a joy, filled with jokes and the subsequent laughter. She would set a stool up for me, when I was too small to reach the countertop, so I could chop the vegetables. Through the laughter, sporadic calls of be careful and the sound of air being sucked through teeth came from my Mum, on the occasions that the worry was too much and she attempted to take the lethally sharp knife off me. Gran would scald her. 

“How is she going to learn, if you keep taking over? Go, make yourself useful elsewhere, we can manage.”

That day, however, Gran said she didn’t need help. She drifted from hob, to oven, to counter top. 

That dinner did not taste as good. They say that food cooked with love, tastes of love. That meal still had a Grandmother’s love in it, but also her sadness.

She had served everyone. Dad offered to plate up, but Gran gave him a hurt look and he wilted. After we ate in silence she, as always, got up and fetched the German cake.

She opened the lid, a battered old thing with The Monarch of the Glen, printed on the metal. A highland scene with a majestic looking stag standing on a heather laden knoll looking regally off into the distance. Inside there were six pieces of German cake, one for each of us. Gran apologetically placed them onto each of our plates.

The German Cake was soft and chewy. There was no warm cartoon aroma, no bite, no crumble. It just disintegrated into an unpleasant glue that tasted like the ghost of the treat I loved so much. 

“I’m sorry they’re not fresh,” she said, as if she had served us dog turds.

“Granny?” I said.

“Yes, love.”

“I don’t have class on Wednesday, is it ok if I drive down and we can bake together?”

She thought for a second then, her face broke into a wide wrinkly smile. “Of course, sweetheart, that would be lovely.”

I drove the narrow roads on Wednesday morning with a good feeling bubbling up in my chest. This was going to be the morning that I got my grandmother back. The sweet, wonderfully funny, cheeky woman who always made sure that there was plenty of food left over for me and gave me the biggest pieces of German Cake.

I pulled into the driveway separating the cottage and the ugly house, now standing on land Grandad worked for decades. Gran stood by the door, wearing her apron, or pinny as she called it. Covered in burn marks and sewn up tears in the flower pattern with two big sagging pockets in the front, but always clean and ironed flat. She waved and gave me her big wrinkly smile.

It was wonderful; we baked for hours until the kitchen was stifling hot and both of our faces glistened with a thin film of sweat. We mocked each other and giggled like a couple of little girls. We cried whenever Grandad came up; we consoled each other with long, floury hugs.

 We baked cupcakes, victoria sponge, banana bread and chocolate chip cookies. We also made Tablet, a Scottish fudge that is ninety percent sugar and a hundred percent yummy. 

Once we had finished cleaning the detritus from the worktop off all the pots and pans, Gran wiped her wet hand on the front of her pinny.

“Shall we make German cake?”

“Yes” I said.

She picked up the big, heavy mixing bowl that Mum said was older than her and passed it to me. I remember looking at it and thinking of the countless batches made in that bowl with the fading paint and cracked lacquer. 

Gran then took out a much smaller bowl and set it in front of her. She told me how to make German Cake which I could not remember for years, as if when I left the cottage that day, the knowledge stayed behind.

For every piece of ingredient that Gran told me to measure out, she separately measured a smaller amount into her smaller bowl.

“I am having less sugar in mine” she said “Doctor’s orders” and she gave me a weak smile with fewer wrinkles but I was sure she had already put sugar into her batch.

When it came time to mix the dough, Gran reached into her pinny, took out a bottle with no label on it and tipped the contents into her bowl.

“Sweetener,” she said, the wrinkles barely visible in her smile as she mixed the substance into her dough.

I leaned over to dip my finger in to taste the sugarless batter. As quick as a gunfighter, Gran slapped the back of my hand, not hard, but it gave me a shock.

“Manners, you have you own.” She said.

After baking, she pulled out two trays, one big, one small, and placed them on the window ledge to cool. The small batch, the sugarless batch, looked anaemic. I reasoned with myself that the lack of sugar meant less caramelisation and thus less colour.

We sat for sometime afterward drinking tea and eating for the baking to cool. Gran asked about my studies and if I had met any boys. I told her I had, and told her about the man who, unknown to me, would become my husband and the father to my own beautiful children.

“He sounds like a good’un,” she said, and I agreed.

As the sun sank low in the sky, Gran wrapped up all the baking, save for the small batch of German Cake. 

 “Make sure you give some of that to your new fella, if you do he’ll never leave you,” she said. She was right.

I loaded the baking into my car, closed the door and turned to the tiny little woman with the big wrinkly smile.

“Bye Gran,” I said and gave her a hug.

She took me in and me for a long moment, warm and tight. When she let me go, her icy blue eyes magnified and wet.

“I had a wonderful day.” she said.

“Me too. I love you, Granny.”

“I love you too, sweetheart.”

She held my hand as I got into my car, letting go only when it was time to put my seatbelt on and close the door.

She stood on the driveway to watch me back out, the last time I saw my Gran, waving from the door, smiling her wrinkled smile.

A friend who had promised to check on her from time to time found Gran. 

Dressed in her Sunday Best, even though it was Thursday, she sat in Grandad’s spot at the head of the table. She had set the table for one. A plate with the remnants of a full roast dinner with all the trimmings sat pushed to one side.

In front of her, a small plate with a single piece of the sugarless German Cake with two, maybe three bites out of it. 

Later we found out the little brown bottle was not sweetener, of course it wasn’t. Gran had made a powder out of her sleeping pills and a cocktail of other drugs prescribed by doctors over the years.

It took me years to figure out the recipe for German Cake. Years. Hundreds of batches, some tasty, some god awful. When my daughter, Jeanie, was old enough, I bought a pretty little stool so she could reach the countertop and help Mummy make a special cake that wasn’t a cake.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“I can’t remember,”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart, the memory left for a while, but I’ll find it. Will you help me?”

“Yes” she said, beaming small creases around her eyes and mouth that would one day become wrinkles.

But we didn’t find the memory. Little Jeanie grew up and met a young girl who loved her wrinkles as much as I did, and they moved to a city miles away.

My son, Billy, joined the Army and went to war, sent by men who wouldn’t send their own sons. He didn’t come back.

My husband died. A stroke. I found him.

The next day, after the undertakers had left, their heads bowed in empathetic sorrow, I pulled out my pots and pans and baked, alone.

The memory wandered in out of the cold. My hands reached for the ingredients without thinking and mixed them in the big mixing bowl with the faded colours and cracked lacquer. More faded and cracked now.

I spooned the mixture into a baking tray and slid it into the oven.

When the timer sounded, I pulled it out and placed it on the window ledge to cool. When they were, I cut a slice and bit into it.

A wave of memories submerged me. Gran’s kitchen, the little stool I stood on as a child. The big oak dining table where Grandad served heaping portions of potato and carrots and gravy. Tweedy with his too bushy tail and old man’s eyes.

That last day with Gran, baking and crying and laughing.

I got up, rustled through a drawer until I found the little box with recipe cards. Carefully, I wrote the recipe down before it went wandering again. I placed it on the dining table that never held the Sunday dinners that I grew up with.

Then I got up and made another batch. A sugarless batch.