Eulogy for a Mother-in-Law and an Heirloom Recipe

January 13th, 2010

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Pineapple Chocolate Cake, oh Dear

don't judge a book by its cover this is fabulously delicious

The ‘High’ Holidays have just left us: the High Holy Days, the most pious of holidays for Jews everywhere. For the next month there will be many religious days coming up – my kids loved this time of year, not for the family celebrations, but for the days off they were entitled to at school. For all intensive purposes Jewish kids should start school in October that is how many holidays are pious enough to be considered a synagogue day.

Every year during my husband’s childhood his mother would bake his favourite cake and I couldn’t understand why I always heard about this cake while we were dating. It seems she took a sabbatical on baking it during his early 20’s and into our marriage and baking just didn’t ‘turn me on’. To be a good baker one has to be precise and dedicated to the art and I was just never dedicated to that art. Good thing too, because when I became pregnant at 25 with my daughter I developed Gestational Diabetes and again when my son was a bun in the oven. Two years later I developed it for ‘real’ and for the rest of my life I spent a journey trying to discover who made the best sugar substitute in the world.

I have discovered it. DiabetiSweet.

Now, after telling many of the ‘baker blogs’ about it I am still waiting to hear back on their opinions. I guess Bakers have no desire to bake with anything called a ‘substitute’.

When the children were ‘begat’ and of the age they could sit in a high chair, she renewed the tradition and so it started that this ‘Pineapple Chocolate Cake’ continuously appeared at any Sztern celebration: be it a birthday, an afternoon tea, or even a bridal shower.

THE most requested dish, it was.

And I doubt it is called the Pineapple Chocolate Cake but alas, that is how we fondly refer to it and in the next breath we also add‘ ‘Daddy used to eat the whole thing and that is why he was so fat as a kid.’ Laugh, laugh or might I say LOL.

Mom is not so well now, but the cake and its tradition must go on my daughter insists, so last year Carly and I took notes on how her grandmother makes this infamous cake. Actually it is cut into squares so it is not a cake but a Square.

We took notes as there is no hard copy recipe; it simply sits in my Mother-in-law’s memory as do all really good recipes from grandmothers who were great cooks. She claims it was given to her in 1959 by a friend and it is definitely not Polish and she knows this as she is Polish. She has no idea where it came from and so goes out the call for anyone who knows where this Square came from and what it is true name.

The following is the recipe for the written in the EXACT way it was prepared. I would have chosen a higher quality chocolate but this is meant to be an exact duplication of a beloved recipe and in 1959 refined chocolate was practically non existent and not readily available to housewives. Bear in mind (what a term) this was written as a Coles Notes: (and as always read through the recipe in its entirety before beginning)

Note: the pictures are no indication of the taste – I obviously did not use a big enough Pyrex and so it looked like this, BUT should these instructions be followed to a tee, it will turn out just like it should…Perfect I am not….but this recipe was re-done in its exactness by mother-in-law who insisted it be done ‘her way’.