The chocolate cake that makes me feel old and young all at once

 I don’t usually look sad when I’m about to have the first bite of a slice of chocolate cake. But at the back of a cupboard in my mother’s Parisian living room, in a box of old photographs, there’s a picture of me with a plaid bow in my hair, ready to blow out the last of five birthday candles planted on top of a chocolate cake. I look surprisingly melancholic, especially for a kid celebrating her birthday.

Turning five was apparently an emotional milestone in my life. Photo: Clemence Michallon.

That chocolate cake is so ingrained in my family’s traditions that it has become a relative in its own right – a relative with outstanding timing, who only visits on birthdays. As my mother remembers it, the cake was brought into our lives around the 1970s thanks to her own mother, my beloved Mamie. According to family folklore, the recipe came from a Tupperware cookbook – Mamie denies being a good homemaker, even though she’s an excellent cook, and the kind who attends Tupperware sales.

The original recipe is lost, but what we have now is better. The day before my mother got married, in a move that my inner feminist would condemn if it hadn’t resulted in delicious chocolate cake yearly, she asked Mamie for the recipe, hoping to bake the cake for her future husband, my dad. Mamie obliged and copied the instructions in her meticulous handwriting, on a sheet of paper that my mother still uses to this day. In the age of electronic copies and cloud computing, where every file is at least backed up on an external hard drive, this is complete and utter madness.

The chocolate cake’s recipe, as copied by my grandmother a few decades ago. Photo: Anne-France Michallon.

I am 23 years old, and I can only remember three birthdays when I didn’t have the chocolate cake. I was about ten the first time, when I decided it was time to be fancy and asked for a cherry tart instead. My mother must have been thrilled: I was born in October, not quite the peak of cherry season. Still, she rose to the task and produced a cherry tart. It was good, but I went back to the chocolate cake the year after.

The second time, I was living in London and my mother wasn’t around to bake the cake. Instead, I had an elaborate chocolate and peanut butter dessert at one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants. Three years later, I had moved to New York and the chocolate cake was replaced with lemon and apricot tarts and a lot of champagne.

As a re-reader of books and a re-re-listener of songs, I relish the rituals that come with the cake. A few days before my birthday, my mother checks that I haven’t been stricken with cherry tart madness and still want “the usual.” Then I pretend that I don’t know the cake is coming – in fact, I’m not even sure it’s my birthday anymore. Just like, as a child, I pretended I didn’t know it was my parents, not the tooth fairy, who left a coin under my pillow – and they pretended they didn’t know I knew.

To make the cake, you need three bowls: the tall metal bowl, to beat egg whites with a hand mixer, the glass bowl, with its calcium streaks, where dark chocolate melts in a bain-marie, and the tan plastic bowl, in which you fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture. You bake the cake in a ribbed pan, serve it on top of a glass stand, and have it again the next morning for breakfast. You eat it plain, unless you’re my rebellious older sister, who went through a “smother it in custard” phase.

I was home when I turned 22, and the chocolate cake was in attendance. Photo: Clemence Michallon.

To make the cake is to be a grown-up, a status I have not yet achieved as evidenced by my baking. When my mother turned 52, I made carrot cake with cream cheese frosting – somewhat of an exotic choice in the land of the French. When my father turned 57, I made David Lebovitz’s almond cake. It simply didn’t occur to me that I, their child, could bake the chocolate cake for them. That cake is made by parents for their kids, not the other way around. I have eaten that cake many times, but I have yet to bake it.

I used to think without a doubt that I would become the cake maker. But as I approached the ripe old age of 23, I realized that having a child, someone to bake the cake for, depended on certain factors – sentimental, financial, biological – that were out of my control. Now, I can’t say for sure that I will become the cake maker.

So I keep on eating the chocolate cake and having it made for me, year after year. I don’t think about any of this while I’m eating it – except maybe for a split second, just long enough for someone to catch me and my melancholic air in a photo.

Clemence Michallon