Getting Older

Today would have been my grandmother’s 111th birthday.

Happy Birthday Grandma!

Grandma is on the right with the camera. As she died when I was two months old, I never really got to know her. But how I know her now is through Kugelhoph, rouladen, and our favorite birthday cake, Viennese Pecan-Chocolate Torte. Another inspiration to add to the pantheon of cooks that inspired me.

From left to right in the photo, it’s Aunt Betty, Grandfather who died six weeks before I was born, Great-Grandma and Grandma.

It is a great hope of mine that when I open a box of my recently deceased mother’s I come across some recipes that I can share with you, because they mean so much to me. On an old typewriter, pre-IBM, she used green ink and a very light paper and transposed a number of hand-written recipes that have lasted at least forty years. I may have one recipe in storage in that format. But I remember the treasured torte recipe as it took three pages and only hope one of my sisters (the bakers) has it to keep forever. It is a pecan biscuit, light chocolate ganache between layers, and a dark chocolate glaze. I’ve never made it but my sisters may have done so over the years.

I haven’t eaten the torte in at least 20 years but remember it vividly from childhood. My youngest sister and I were born in the same month so we got to share in one. It is a taste memory I’ll have forever. In homage to the cooks that influenced our lives, Dee