What Nonna Would Have Said About Icing
The cake was mine. Not the recipe, which came out of Nonna's notebook in her own handwriting, but the decision about the icing, which I made without asking anybody and then had to defend for two evenings.
Nonna's rule is simple. Sugar hides the fruit. She said it about apricot jam, and she said it about cakes, and in her notebook the icing of every birthday cake from 1999 onwards is written as butter, sugar, a little lemon zest, and nothing else. No cream, no chocolate, no decoration. When my mother asked her once how a cake was supposed to look, she said that it was supposed to be eaten, and that a cake nobody wants to eat has been iced by somebody who was thinking about pictures instead of people.
My mother made it that way for my birthday. I wanted the chocolate one, the dark and glossy kind with the thin layer that cracks when you cut it, and my sister wanted a white buttercream with lemon in it, which is my mother's way and Nonna's way at once. We argued about it, quietly, the way we argue, meaning that nothing was said out loud for two days and everything was said through the way we closed cupboards.
We ate all three on the Saturday, in the order they were made, and my mother was right that the plain one is the only one that keeps its shape the next morning. Elena was right that the lemon one was the best. And I was right that the chocolate is what people talk about. Nobody gave in. Nobody had to, because the argument was never about the sugar at all, it was about who was allowed to decide, and that has never been settled in this house.