My Mother Loves Me

It seems that the Hill Street Ward Break the Fast has been slowly dying since I came here to Ann Arbor. There have been a few attempts to revive the institution, recently resulting in moving Break the Fast away from Fast Sunday altogether and renaming it Ward Mingle. But after a month or two of meager offerings (a pot of spaghetti, a bowl of corn, and five desserts, perhaps), the ward Spiritual and Temporal Welfare Committee (they are in charge, because food, after all, is the essence of temporal welfare) has embarked upon another revitilization effort in the form of Themes.

Today is the second mingle with a theme. The first theme, last month, was Scattergories - you had to bring a dish that began with whichever letter your name begins with. I brought apple bars. Some contributions were a bit of a stretch, like Jessica's Jamaican Dip, which was actually Mexican dip. Others went all out - Dave's Double-Dipped Delights, or Counselor Chad's Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies. The winner managed to use the first letters of her first name, and last name, consecutively, three times in the title, a feat that certainly deserved recognition.

Riding on the success of the Scattergories mingle, our STW committee chairperson announced last week that this month we would have a Memory Lane Mingle. "Think back to when you were ten years old," he told us, "and remember that one food that, whenever your mom made it, you knew she loved you."

So all this week I thought about it. I have plenty of food memories from childhood dinners, but none of them seemed quite right. There's tuna casserole, which was always a family favorite (really!), but too common to stand out as something special, particularly since it began falling to me to make the dish sometime around the time I was ten, when my parents would come home late from my brothers' soccer practices. Cowboy Delight probably falls within the same category. There's also open-faced tacos, or chimichangas, or taco salad, which were on the special side, but hard to cart to the Institute building and keep fresh. Then there's the infamous Creamed Tuna on Toast, with which my parents could ruin a perfectly lovely day at Disneyland and which, Kelsey agrees, would have gone completely against the professed theme of the ward mingle. Even my roommate, who has never had the pleasure of actually eating Creamed Tuna on Toast, agrees that it sounds hideous.

But what was special in our family were Sunday breakfasts. Somewhere along the way a seasonal treat of coffee cake (or sweet rolls or muffins) and homemade hot chocolate became weekly tradition, probably when my brothers' and my young memories were too short to actually remember that hot chocolate actually seasonal. However it happened, I have only the faintest memories of a time when we didn't have our special Sunday morning breakfast, even when Fast Sunday meant we had it on Monday morning instead. My mom's homemade hot chocolate would definitely count as that food that, whenever mom made it, we knew she loved us. But hot chocolate is even more difficult than open-faced tacos to serve at a ward function. It's hard to transport, hard to keep warm, hard to serve because it requires special styrofoam cups.

So, still, on the breakfast train of thought I briefly flitted by brown sugar muffins and Scandenavian kringler and banana bread and cinnamon biscuits, and finally landed on maple coffee cake.

"Oh yes," said Kelsey immediately when I told her. "Oh yes," every other Jeppsen is thinking as they read this. If there is any food in the Jeppsen family culinary tradition that says "Mom loves you," it is maple coffee cake. It was special. It was coveted. It was pretty. It was tasty. We always argued about who got the middle piece (the one with the least amount of crust and the greatest amount of filling and frosting) but that argument was sort of a moot point. We all knew that Dad always got the middle piece - except when Mom happened to make the coffee cake on (or near) our birthday, in which case Dad would split the middle piece with the birthday kid.

The problem is, although I've had the recipe for years, it's not easy to make. First of all, it's a yeast dough - but I can handle that. I learned to make homemade bread back when I was a sophomore in college and I am now the official roll maker for our family's Christmas dinner. But loaves and rolls are easy - this is a shaped coffee cake. First you split the dough into three parts, then roll each piece into a 12-inch circle. Rolling dough is a challenge for me. Pie crusts, for instance, end up lopsided and pieced together, and sometimes thrown out in frustration after rerolling and rerolling until the dough becomes tough. The couple times I've attempted to make pinwheel cookies have been complete failures because, for the life of me, no matter how carefully I wield the rolling pin, I can't get the dough to resemble anything like a rectangle. Three 12-inch circles sounds intimidating, particularly with the elasticity of a yeast dough. And even after the (hypothetically successful) dough rolling, the dough must be layered with filling, then cut, then each individual piece twisted. So although I've held onto the recipe like a family heirloom, I've never quite had the nerve to try it until today. I made sure I had a backup plan in the form of my mom's oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, which I already know I can whip up in a matter of minutes if needs be. But the Memory Land-themed mingle also seemed like the perfect time to put the recipe to the test so that, when I have my own children to shower love on in the form of Sunday morning breakfasts, I will be well prepared.

I think I was successful, actually. I didn't want the coffee cake to come out doughy, and as a result it ended up a bit browner on the edges than I intended. But the darker crust is still soft so I don't think any major damage was done. And it looks pretty, which is what's most important. Well, second most important. In about half an hour I'll find out if it tastes good too.

I call the middle piece!