Essential Recipes

I had plans this week to make spice cake with penuche icing. We're not big sweets eaters, but I like to fix a dessert for the weekend.

I found a recipe for spice cake, but then discovered none of my cookbooks had the right penuche icing recipe. (For those who don't peruse the cookbooks of a bygone era, penuche icing is a kind of creamy brown-sugar icing.) There were similar recipes, but they were not the recipe.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had to have the right recipe. That my day would not be complete without licking the leftover penuche icing in the pan. So I called my younger sister and had her find the page in the right recipe book (no doubt marred permanently by my adolescent cooking endeavors) and give it to me. Now all is well, except that I have to wait until the cake is all baked and cooled to make the frosting.

My sister also announced that she thinks the cat is expecting again. Do pregnant cats get cravings? "I've just got to have a little mole. No, a shrew will not do."