Family Kitchen

•A pint-size chef shows you how to bake a cake.

“Good job using your muscles, Mama!”

WHEN IT COMES TO COOKING FOR MY FAMILY, I’M HAPPY TO TAKE DIRECTIONS—FROM

Grandma, the Taste of Home Test Kitchen…even my friend’s 8-year-old daughter, Isabel.

Recently Isabel sent me a handwritten note titled “How to Make a Cake.” Looking it over, I thought, I need to make this with Layla. You see, my 3-year-old daughter is what I would call a cake aficionado. And she loves to help me out in the kitchen. Together, we agreed to follow Isabel’s instructions to the letter.

Step 1: Combine flour and sugar. Lots of sugar.

“First you get a bowl. Next you pour 3 or 2 or 5 cups of flower and suger,” Isabel wrote. Layla clarified that Isabel meant 3 cups of flour and 5 cups of sugar. I asked Layla if she was sure. That seemed to be a lot of sugar. She responded with a confident “Yes, Mama.” I trusted her.

Step 2: Add eggs and “buder.”

Three eggs and two sticks of melted “buder.” The batter was thick, as if perhaps we were making bread— or Play-doh.

Step 3: Put in the extra elbow grease.

Next, we added 3 teaspoons of “backing soda” and 1 teaspoon of “backing poter.” The batter was so stiff that Layla handed the spoon over to me. “Good job using your muscles, Mama,” she said.

Step 4: Add “cindens” milk and water.

“Pour in a small carten of cindens milk and ster it up. Then fill up a pot or a cup of water hafe way and pour it in.” I didn’t have a cafeteriasized carton of milk in the fridge, so I poured in as much as I thought one would hold. And we filled a coffee cup halfway with water and added that. It’s not like baking is about precision… right?

Step 5: Bake for 30 minutes.

We poured the gooey batter into a 13×9-in. pan. Then I put the cake in the oven for half an hour, per Isabel’s instructions. When the timer went off, there appeared to be a floating island of caramelized sugar in the center of a still-liquid sea of batter. The cake took 45 more minutes to stop jiggling. By this time, the center had sunk like a valley, and the sides had risen up like jagged sugar rocks.

Step 6: Frost, eat… enjoy. Once the cake cooled, Layla and I covered it with pink icing and insisted on a family taste test.

My husband snapped off a piece of the edge and took a mouse-sized bite. “Sugary,” he said.

My dad dug in with a fork and declared it great. “He likes sugar,” explained my mom, who politely declined.

Layla was all about it—because it was cake. I cut her off after a few bites, afraid the sugar rush would punish us all later.

In the end, making Isabel’s cake was a delightful activity. After all, I learned a few things—for one, measurements are important! And I got to spend time in the kitchen with my kid. I’d say that’s a successful bake.