High Maintenance Mom

There were very few women in my science doctoral programs who had any household knowledge that couldn't be learned in a chemistry book. So one of the shocks for myself and my husband is my current need to have a more presentable house. It's as if one year a biologic clock went off that said I needed to have kids and a few years later another clock went off that told me to clean the house and learn something about cooking.

In an informal poll, almost all of my friends want clean houses. My thought is that we all find our lives a little stressful and organization of our living situations can make a big difference. A recent article, in Men's Health (I think), mentioned that our happiness follows a "U" shape with the lows around 40 when the pressures of work and a family are greatest. The bottom of the "U" is the mid-life crisis and the article was saying, we can't avoid it. So maybe this is the beginning of mine. The realization that my life doesn't look like the movies or stories I've read and as much as I pretended that it wasn't what I wanted, I do want some of it.

Do you also have an image of what your family life would look like? Some modified 1950's ideal where our kids are perfectly behaved, but not robots, our houses are clean, but we don't have to spend all day doing it, and we sit down to family dinners where everyone appreciates everyone else and the food is always good? In mine, the food magically appeared and the mess magically went away. When I interviewed for college I remember hearing in the waiting room that one potential classmate spoke five languages, another had written a screenplay, and a third was a concert violinist. I left thinking everyone was valedictorian of their class, spoke multiple languages, had been published, and played an instrument professionally. Maybe that's my vision of the perfect home too, a collection of impossible traits that very few actually posess.

With the impossible vision in mind, I have an exciting trick to share. My trick will be old news to some (many?) and of no interest to others but it's easy and may have just become one of my "things". You know, the easy food that you bring to other's houses that you know will work out. I don't have very many dishes I can do that with, mainly because I like to "loosely" follow the recipes. So my new dish is a bundt cake in the shape of a sandcastle. I bought the Nordic Ware Sandcastle Bundt pan at Williams Sonoma for $30 after B cried about it. I drove home hoping it wouldn't sit with the juicer and tortilla maker in the garage. When I mentioned what we were going to cook in it, I found out that B really wanted to use it in the sandbox, like his very similar $1.00 ones from Target (which I may use as jello molds in the future).

As I couldn't bother to follow the recipe on the packaging, I doubled our favorite Trader Joe's Pumpkin bread recipe and dumped it in (after oiling and dusting the pan with flour - the most time-consuming part). About 65 minutes later, I had a perfect sandcastle pumpkin cake (the picture was taken quickly so B could eat part of it - in the future I have plans to dust it with sugar and add strawberries, oh and cut off the bottom). B was delighted and so was I. I felt like I had stepped back into the 1950's until I read that the bundt pan didn't become popular until the mid- to late 1960's.

In 1950, the landmark pan was introduced, after the Minneapolis Chapter of the Hadassah Society asked Dave and Dotty [Dalquist] to produce a kuglehof pan, similar to the one the society's president had received from her grandmother in Germany. Dave produced the pan from cast aluminum for the Hadassah Society and a few for the Nordic Ware trademark, which he sold to department stores using the name, bund pan. (The word bund means a gathering-thus a bund cake, with its characteristic fluting, was a cake suitable for a gathering or party.) Nordic Ware created the pan and filed for a trademark to protect its creation, renaming the pan the Bundt pan.

Ella Helfrich, in 1966, used a Bundt pan for her winning recipe of Tunnel of Fudge Cake, in the 17th Pillsbury Bake-off. Following the contest, Pillsbury was overwhelmed with more than 200,000 requests from people that wanted to purchase a winning Bundt pan. In 1971, Pillsbury launched a line of Bundt cake mixes, licensing the name from Nordic Ware that continued the nationwide quest for Bundt pans. (from the Nordic Ware website)

Check out the numerous bundt products. I hope to try the Floral Mini Pan one day.