"40 min in 8x8 pan"

Our recipe was the Great Depression cake that my mother found in the newspaper and clipped out for you and I. It doesn’t use eggs, or milk, or butter, which was perfect for us, because we were poor in college. The ingredients it did call for—flour, sugar, cocoa powder, salt, baking soda, vanilla extract, white vinegar, canola oil, water—we could afford those, for the most part. Usually, we’d nab some vanilla off of one of our neighbors, like Sam Gorman a couple doors down, room 342, who probably could’ve bought both of our childhood homes in cash and not bat an eye. But she was cool, and she let us use her vanilla extract, which came in this tiny little plastic bottle and dribbled out the same way water drips out of a pipette. 

We always baked the cake in the same eight-by-eight pan. Neither of us remembered where the pan originally came from, but it was always kept under the sink next to the blue microfiber rags we used to clean the mirror, eternally pockmarked with toothpaste and face lotion no matter how often we Windexed it. At one point, we gave up on cleaning it and started drawing pictures on it with Expo markers. Those stayed next to the pan, too. The first step was measuring the dry ingredients and then just dumping them straight into the pan, but cocoa powder has this strange tendency to cough on you when you open the bag, so we’d end up covered in chalky brown spots by the end of the first step. It was kind of like we had participated in one of those color runs that middle-aged people like so much. 

This was your step, the second one. I did most of the heavy lifting, like the whisking, the measuring of the dry stuff, putting the pan in the oven, and making the frosting later on, but this was your step. The recipe called for you to make three wells in your dry mixture, carved out with a spoon: one well for vanilla, one for vinegar, and one for canola oil. You would open the silverware drawer and pick out a big spoon and carefully make three wells. I would measure the wet ingredients; you’d pour them in. Then, after, you’d pour a cup of water over the whole thing, destroying the wells and crumbling the great flour-and-sugar dunes, suppressing the coughs of the cocoa, and you’d mix it together with the same spoon and scrape around the sides and on the bottom of the pan to get all the dry stuff that was hiding underneath, and I’d just watch. Every time we made it, you got better at scraping the edges, so I wouldn’t have to go back in afterward and check your work. I was the better baker of us two, but you were the more impassioned chef, no matter the recipe. Boxed mac and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, Great Depression cake—nobody could make them like you made them. 

I made some corny joke at your funeral, I think. I can’t quite remember what I said, because I really don’t recall that day all that well anymore, but I talked about the cake, and I said something like, “I am Greatly Depressed you can’t make the wells in the pan for me anymore,” and I think people might’ve laughed at it, but it was polite, pity laughter. I imagined you sitting in one of the front pews giving me a sheepish smile; knowing I’d never be a stand-up comedian, but knowing that I let myself be vulnerable enough to make crappy jokes. You always liked that about me. 

The people we made that cake for remember it well. It would come out of the oven with this airy quality to it, kind of like if a muffin made a wish to be a cake. Everybody got that cake on their birthday, and everybody loved it. There was no doubt about it—when one of our friends was having a birthday, we’d be in charge of the cake. But after you were gone, I didn’t have anybody to make the wells for me. Now, when people ask me about it, or mention it, I just tell them I lost the recipe a while ago. I can’t find it. It was on an old newspaper clipping, and you know me, I lose track of my stuff often. 

It’s my birthday today—a day we would’ve spent making that cake for me. After it was done baking, you would’ve taken it somewhere to decorate it crudely with pink Pillsbury frosting, the kind that comes in a tub, and blue nonpareils. You'd spell out “HAPPY BiRTHDAY,” knowing my eye would twitch at the lowercase I. Nowadays, when my special day rolls around, I open up the top drawer of my desk and, underneath the pristine pile of greeting cards I’ve organized by holiday, I fish out that old, poorly cut square of newspaper, and I reread it over and over again. As always, my eyes are drawn to your footnote drawn in pen: an asterisk next to the baking time, which calls for thirty-five minutes in the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. But you made sure that, after our first time making the cake, we’d know the cake really needed “40 min in 8x8 pan.” 

Every year on my birthday since you’ve been gone, I’ve blown out the candles on the cake your sister makes for me, and I’ve wished that I could go back to those forty minutes again. Just forty minutes: washing the measuring cups in the sink with Dawn soap and sponges, running to Sam’s and returning the vanilla, and turning on the oven light and watching the cake bake through the glass part of the oven door. We would sit on the linoleum floor and watch as the batter rose and spread unevenly, forming this strange little chasm in the middle. Afterwards, we’d lather the frosting on thick over that part, but it didn’t do much to fool anyone, since it was always pretty obvious that there was something kind of missing in the middle. You hypothesized once that maybe the chasm wouldn’t form if we baked it in a bigger pan, maybe for thirty-five minutes instead of forty, and I said you were probably right, but we were poor and only had one pan, and if I could go back to those forty minutes—less poor and with a bigger pan—I’d still use that old pan under the sink and watch that valley form in the middle of the cake, because thirty-five minutes in a bigger pan would never be half as sacred as forty minutes in an eight-by-eight, watching that holy divide form, forgetting how cold and hard the floor was, knowing that nothing was as important and that nothing would ever be as important as this.

Hannah DeFeo

Hannah DeFeo is a third-year Creative Writing & Legal Studies major with a minor in Political Science. Ever since she could, Hannah has been a voracious reader and a passionate writer, typically focusing on poetry and long-form fiction. She has recently stepped out of her comfort zone by writing short stories and flash fiction. She hopes you enjoy her work as she continues her life-long work of honing her craft.