As a child, the meals I vividly remember started with my mother using all the burners on the stove, and having something cooking inside the oven. A huge pot large enough to put over my head, with stubby black handles on the sides, tightly covered, steam forcing its way out from the lid, would simmer over one of the burners. A frying pan filled with something smelling great, filled to the brim. How she managed to stir all its contents without spilling them all over the place still amazes me. Sometimes she would have me check to see if the cake baking in the oven was ready. She’d give me a toothpick and a pot holder. I’d carefully, and frightfully open the three hundred-twenty five degree oven, slide the rack out a little, then poke into the center of one of the pans. Observing the withdrawn toothpick, I would reply, “still needs a few more minutes.” I would do this for each of the three pans that would later form a delicious German Chocolate cake made from scratch, with sifted flour.

Trying to help out as much as possible and not trying to get in my mother’s way, at the same time trying to play the macho kid that doesn’t spend too much time in the kitchen cooking with mama, was an exercise in self control for a fat little Filipino kid. Helping out in the kitchen was very enjoyable and interesting. There was a process to do everything. From cooking chicken adobo, cleaning the rice, rolling up egg rolls, to making the German chocolate cake. There were shiny knives, complicated sifters, and special pots and pans to use for each particular step in the grand process. All this neat stuff, just to make food you put into your mouth and never see again, at least not in the same form. I was utterly fascinated with all that went into the creation of each meal. From raw meat and staples came main courses and yummy side dishes that would forever be the gauge of what real cooking meant to me.

There were times that I would start out helping my mother in the early afternoon, preparing a large holiday meal. If there was mixing that needed to be done, I was your man. “Mix the pancit in the pan so that it doesn’t burn on the bottom”, my mother would ask. I was there. A pineapple upside down cake mix needs to be whipped together, I could do that with ease. The only thing that gave me a problem, was mixing up a meat loaf or something similar like the Filipino egg roll filling. The sight of raw ground meat didn’t bother me, I was used to that. My hands would just get so frost bitten from mixing the ground meat, onions, bread crumbs, green peppers, and so on, since the meat had not really thawed out from being in the freezer. Meat loafs were a lot easier to make since the amount of ground meat being used was a pound or a pound and a half. With the egg rolls, which are essentially individual meat loafs wrapped in filo dough, rolled up to be about the size of your thumb, the amount of ground meat being used for the whole batch was usually double the amount used for a meat loaf. We would make literally hundreds of egg rolls. You try mixing up two to three pounds of partially thawed ground meat into rough bread crumbs, vegetables, and a few raw eggs. Mixing the eggs in wasn’t so bad, it was really gooey, as a kid I didn’t mind the goo. Feeling the gooey egg stuff run through my hands as I mixed the partially frozen meat was quite enjoyable. Some kids had mud pies to play with, I had egg roll mixtures to amuse myself. The warm eggs were the only thing keeping my hands from acquiring frost bite. That and a few well deserved breaks every couple of minutes, just to get the blood flowing. After mixing the stuff together, I would usually be too tired to continue helping in the kitchen. This gave me an out to go play with my brothers or watch tv. I would have to promise my mother that I’d return later to help out, once I had recuperated from my exhaustion. Whether I actually came back to help depended on what she wanted me to do.

If I was going to be stirring stuff on the stove, I’d politely pass and continue playing video games. If I was going to be rolling up egg rolls, which I was not very good at, I’d pass as well. The egg rolls I made and placed along side the ones my mother or my grandmother made just didn’t match up in length, width, or general shape. The egg rolls that were already stacked together looked like a nice tight formation of troops, ready to go into the frying pan. The egg rolls I laid down looked more like malformed footballs that just didn’t fit into this lean, mean, tight group of soldiers. Quickly I would wash my hands of the job, and go galavanting off to see what kind of trouble I could get myself into.

On the other hand, if my mother asked me to prepare a German chocolate cake for desert, I was surely up to the challenge. For me, this task of making the cake was the piece de resistance, the ultimate of all tasks in the kitchen. Sure, the cake tasted wonderful in the end, but the process of making the German chocolate cake was meticulously exciting. There were steps that could not be veared away from in the slightest, lest you end up with a mediocre final product. The mixing pans had to be free from the slightest bit of moisture or oil, or else the egg whites would’t fluff up properly. Unlike other cakes, this recipe called for sifted flower. If you didn’t sift the flower, the texture of the cake would end up too dense, instead of being light and fluffy. This recipe called for not one special baking pan, but three, three delightful layers of precious moist cake. To top it all off, the recipe called for the use of a technique called folding. Any step that had a particular name associated with it, especially one with a cool name like folding, was all that much more impressive to me. Chopping up the semi-sweet chocolate and melting it to just the right consistency was always a challenge. Believe me when your mother says you won’t like the taste of unsweetened baking chocolate. It looks and smells so good, yet tastes so bad by itself. They should have a label on the front informing kids that this is not an extra large candy bar.

My apprenticeship for making the German Chocolate Cake started by observing the process over my mother’s shoulder and only providing physical labor when needed. If she needed a sifter, I would be the one squeezing the contraption. If she needed eggs separated, I was the egg shell cracker. If she needed the pans greased, my fingers would be just the right size. Gradually she would allow me to perform some of the more complicated steps like separating the yolk from the egg white; operating the cake mixer alone and even switching the blades; and most important of all, measuring all the ingredients by myself. To a kid these are huge accomplishments, especially since it did take quite a few extra eggs to get the hang of cracking and separating just right. I think we made lots of extra omlletts or used the eggs in cake mixtures that came out of a box and didn’t need to have the eggs separated. It took a couple of years of assisting my mother with the production of this most beautiful of deserts, before she allowed me to make one on my own, or at least with the most minimal of supervision. She did keep checking up with me on every step of the process, but she did so from the other side of the kitchen where she was engaged with preparing some other dish.

Over time I was producing the German chocolate cakes for holiday dinners with the most minimal of supervision. I had the process down pat. The sifting of the flower, the separating of the eggs, setting the oven temperature, mixing the coconut frosting, and assembling each layer, keeping mind of how much frosting to use in between each layer so as not to run out of frosting before the top and sides were completely covered with the sweet coconut frosting. This frosting was not like other frostings. Typical frosting was gritty, and too sweet. This frosting had a smoothness to it, a sophistication, a creaminess, and one of my favorite textures, coconut. It all culminated into a wonderful, sweet, cylindrical, edible piece of art.