The Cake Lady

My mother always baked the best cakes, pies, cupcakes, brownies, cobblers, cheesecake, cookies. You name it, she could bake it. Growing up, me and my younger sister got to lick the batter from the cake beaters, and we got to eat the extra crust she baked from the scrapes left from a pie crust she had made from scratch. Often, I would have to flour or butter a pan and me and my younger sister had to sit down when she was baking you couldn’t run around. We were content to play with our toys and enjoy the aroma of good scents coming from her oven.

Picture: My mother's famous sweet potato pie (Credits: Justice Plummer)

My mother had gotten so good with baking. She baked every Sunday since she was 10. She and her two brothers would go to their Grandmother’s store (which was in the front of her house) and they would buy ingredients for cakes, pies, cupcakes….my mother found great joy in baking. It was her prized talent.

Pictured: a teapot cake my mother made for my youngest daughter, Javanna (Credit: Javanna Plummer)

When my 3 children were in high school, their school had a Fall Festival and my mother was notorious for winning all the bake competitions they held each year. She once made one of them a cake shaped like a purse and I remember one year my birthday in March, fell on Easter Sunday. She baked me a cake shaped like a Bunny head. It had white frosting and coconut for its fur. It was our Stepfather & the families hope that she would open a bakery. But she didn’t want to deal with all the paperwork and legalities of getting a business license. She did however sell her cakes and pies for a family member or friends request for their birthday or for the holidays.

Pictured: My mother's last cake. This was her famous Strawberry cake (Credits: Justice Plummer)

Speaking of holidays, during Thanksgiving and Christmas she would make 4–6 Sweet potato pies, she would also bake a cake be it carrot cake, German chocolate cake or her famous strawberry and white whipped cake. (This was everyone’s favorite cause the strawberries were always so fresh and the homemade frosting was so sweet, light and fluffy.) Every holiday she baked and one 4th of July she baked a cake and decorated it like the American flag (see header image).If we were having a party she would bake cupcakes.

I am so happy that my oldest daughter who spent a lot of time in her Grandmother’s kitchen picked up some of my mother’s baking skills. Although my mother passed last October, my oldest daughter will dedicate a dessert for my mother. For a few Pop Ups my mother had baked a cake and whenever my oldest daughter presents her desserts people remark how good they are. She has an online dessert shop but she hopes to expand to a cake truck or kitchen. As for now whenever she bakes she posts videos of her desserts on social media. (Her business is called "Just Us Sweets.”)

I had a dedication page for my mother in my book: (“The CHI Brown Girl,”) and I notated one of the nicknames everyone called my mother, “Cake Lady.” I want my mother to know she can put her oven mitt down cause the torch has been passed on to my oldest daughter. Our holidays won’t be the same but we will cherish all the sweet memories. We raise our glasses of Champagne to salute “The Cake Lady.”

Pictured: My Three Js with their "Grandmere" (what they called her)