Stir (23 page)

The cake that I know as Janet's is actually an Ina Garten recipe to which Janet made one small, brilliant change. Instead of whole milk, Janet uses coconut milk in the batter. Thanks to the added fat, you end up with an especially rich and tender crumb. Be careful at the store not to pick up “coconut milk beverage” or “coconut milk drink,” which are thin and watery. You're looking for pure coconut milk in a can. You don't have to be a die-hard coconut lover to enjoy this cake, by the way. The coconut flavor is nice and gentle.

Janet adapted this recipe from Ina Garten's
Barefoot Contessa at Home
.

For the cake:

1½ cups (3 sticks; 340 grams) unsalted butter, at cool room temperature, plus more for greasing the pans

2 cups (400 grams) granulated sugar

6 large eggs, at room temperature

1½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1½ teaspoons pure almond extract

3 cups (375 grams) all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting the pans

1 teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon fine sea salt

1 cup well-shaken coconut milk

1¼ cup (113 grams) shredded unsweetened coconut

For the frosting:

1 pound (454 grams) cream cheese, at room temperature

1 cup (2 sticks; 226 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon pure almond extract

3½ cups (454 grams) confectioners' sugar, sifted

1¾ cup (165 grams) shredded unsweetened coconut, for finishing

Bake the cakes:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter two round 9-inch cake pans, then line the bottoms with cut-out circles of parchment paper. Butter the paper, and lightly dust with flour.

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the 1½ cups butter and the granulated sugar on medium speed for 3 to 5 minutes, until fluffy. Crack the eggs into a glass. With the mixer on medium speed, add the eggs one at a time, waiting for each egg to be fully incorporated before slipping the next one in. Pause to scrape down the bowl after mixing in the third egg, then again once all of the eggs have been incorporated. Add the 1½ teaspoons each of vanilla and almond extract, and mix well. It's okay if the mixture looks curdled.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. With the mixer on low speed, add half of the dry ingredients, then all of the coconut milk, then the rest of the dry ingredients. Mix until just combined. Fold in the 4 ounces coconut with a rubber spatula.

Pour the batter into the prepared pans and spread evenly. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, until the tops are brown and a toothpick inserted into the centers comes out clean. Cool in their pans on a rack for 30 minutes, then turn the cakes out onto the rack and cool completely.

Make the frosting:

Put the cream cheese, the 1 cup butter, the 1 teaspoon vanilla, and the ¼ teaspoon almond extract in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Add the confectioners' sugar and continue mixing on low speed, just until smooth. Do not whip.

Assemble the cake:

Tear four 2- to 3-inch strips of wax paper and arrange them in a square on your cake stand or serving plate. Place one cake layer, top side down, in the center of the square, with the four strips of wax paper partially sticking out on all sides. (The strips are to keep the plate clean from frosting. You'll remove them before serving, taking any smears with you.)

Spread the top of the cake layer with frosting. Place the second layer on top, top side up, and frost the entire cake. Sprinkle with coconut and lightly press some onto the sides, then remove the wax paper. Serve at room temperature.

Serves 12.

O
ur Berlin flat on Prenzlauer Allee was in a building painted marigold yellow. Bright pennant flag bunting ran across the sidewalk between a lamppost and the awning of the shop downstairs. The neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, once part of East Berlin, was a mix of small businesses and residences, with a tramline running through it down our street. At the stop across from our building, you could board the M2 and be in the center of town in eight minutes. My German classes were there, at the Goethe-Institut on Neue Schönhauser Strasse. I would often walk home. When I'd spot the flags flapping in the breeze, I'd know I was almost there.

I had found our flat on craigslist—rather the flat had found us, when a woman named Olivia responded to our listing. Olivia would be traveling all summer with her boyfriend, Fabian, and they were looking for subletters, and would their flat perhaps meet our needs? “Greetings,” she signed off at the end of her e-mail.

It was a modest flat comprising a small bedroom and a larger space divided into a living room and an eat-in kitchen. All the windows stretched from floor to ceiling and swung open to shallow Juliet balconies, except for in the living room, where they opened onto an actual balcony on the back of the building. There was a little table out there, two chairs, and a few potted plants that I'd do my best not to kill. Below was a brick and cement patio, and just beyond it, a yard of tall grass, trees, wildflowers, and vines. In the mornings, light filtered through the foliage and cast leafy shadows on the hardwood floors.

On the other side of the apartment, the bedroom looked out over the square courtyard and entryway. We slept with the window open and awoke to the early morning sounds of our neighbors: a man singing, a child's voice, someone's daily coughing fit. Two stories up, a disembodied mannequin leg stuck straight out into the courtyard between the balcony bars. I knew it wasn't real, but I always looked twice.

We had landed in Berlin three weeks postsurgery. I was at that curious stage of recovery that feels less like fading illness and more like persistent, low-grade disorientation, when you neither trust in the absolute health of your own body nor completely dismiss it. It is not unlike the disorientation one feels when living in a new city, speaking a new language, finding one's footing in a new routine, swinging wildly between the certainty that you are doing fine and the certainty that you are not. My first few weeks in Berlin, I wasn't always sure if it was the new head on my shoulders or the new ground beneath my feet that had me feeling at once tilted and tired, giddy and at times quite faint. It was probably a little of both. I chose to think of it as the latter.

Berlin is beautiful in a rough-around-the-edges kind of way. You can see the seams between the old and the new, between the new and the newer, and I like that. Eli and I had been in Berlin together once before in college, when our choir went on a spring break tour through Germany. We spent only a couple of days in Berlin, but it made an impression. This was over a year before we started dating, yet I remember both of us saying that we wanted to spend some more time there.

Now we had a whole summer to get to know the city. We could do all the tourist stuff and still have plenty of time for very important things like finding a favorite breakfast spot, learning never to stand in the bicycle lane while waiting for the light to change, and cultivating opinions about the best yogurts and breads to be had; time for walking directly from the tram station to the supermarket after spotting a chocolate-dipped rice cake, something called a
Schoko Reiswaffel
, in the hands of a little boy on the M2. It was fun to dig in and really live there, to buy sunflower seed bread,
Sonnenblumenkernbrot
, by the loaf, slice and toast it in our own kitchen in our own toaster, and slather it with plum butter or quark; to sit on the balcony with a bowlful of fresh red currants, pluck them from their stems or pop them off with our teeth, and feel them burst on our tongues, like sweet-and-sour caviar.

We visited the Pergamon, the Hamburger Bahnhof, and what's left of the wall at Mauerpark, but we also hosted new friends for dinner, washed piles of dishes, and negotiated the return of an Internet router in a language that's not our own. We walked miles. Sometimes with soft, warm pretzels in hand, sometimes clutching tiny cups of hazelnut gelato and even tinier spoons.

My classes were in the afternoons, so mornings were mine. I'd carry my German workbook down the street to Café Anna Blume, order a black tea with milk and a croissant with apricot-sage jam, and do my homework. On the weekends, Eli would join me. We'd order a multitiered platter of fruit, cheese, sugared crepes, fresh rolls, and smoked fish, and settle in for two hours.

A few blocks from our flat, past the stationery shop with the pretty paper notebooks, the dusty paper lanterns that hung in a storefront window, the baby boutique with the Marimekko bibs, and the bakery with the disappointing pastries, a farmers' market set up twice a week. We had arrived in Berlin in the middle of a heat wave that kept us from cooking much at first. We stuck with mostly stovetop and cutting board meals: eggs and rice, sautéed zucchini with plum sauce, heaps of strawberries for dessert. But the surest way to make a home feel like home is to turn on the oven, so when the heat finally broke, I squeezed through the market crowd, picked up a basket of apricots, and plotted my first bake.

I worked without a recipe, rubbing a block of butter into flour, sugar, and oats until I'd formed a topping that was more dough than crumble. The consistency was wetter and heavier than my usual mixture, but instead of adding more flour or oats, I decided to leave it alone. I halved the apricots and arranged them in a baking dish, then buried them under the topping. It was so thick that I had to spread it with a spoon and sort of pat it into place. Just out of the oven I could see it was something special. The apricots had brightened in color and flavor and melted into rich, almost spreadable versions of themselves. The top was like a sprawling oatmeal cookie.

I made it again for dinner guests a few days later, which left me with three apricots, too few for a crumble or a pie. So I halved them, removed the pits, dredged them in sugar, and set them in a baking dish. There was an open bottle of white wine on the counter that I emptied into the dish to form a shallow pool around the apricots, just enough to cover their bottoms, and cooked them in a hot oven. A half hour later, the wine was now a syrup. The apricots had gone all bold and buttery as apricots do. They looked heavy, full, crinkled around the edges, as though waking up from a deep sleep.

I took out two cereal bowls and spooned an apricot and a half and some of the winey syrup into each one while Eli grabbed the vanilla ice cream for on top. We went out to the balcony, to the little table and chairs, and I sat down, drew my knees up to my chin, and took a bite.

Where I sat on that balcony in Berlin with a bowl of baked apricots resting on my knees was where I might have sat had I never been sick at all. It felt that way sometimes, as though the aneurysm had never happened, as though by living through it to the other side, I'd arrived somewhere that felt conspicuously, gloriously, like where and who I'd once been. At the same time, not at all.

I had tried to resist the idea of a before and an after. I was adamant that in all those long months of illness and recovery, nothing had changed, least of all me. To admit change was to admit defeat, I thought, to concede that I had allowed myself to be carried off by the current of this terrible thing.

But we are always swept this way and that. We create the life we want to live, yes. Then, in return, that life creates us. We follow the tides; we have no choice. We splash about beneath the brightest of moons, then the darkest of skies, tug hard from the surface on anchors that refuse to budge, and then, if we are very brave, dive deep. There in Berlin, I felt it: Things
were
different.
I
was different. And what's more, I didn't want to go back to the way things were before.

 • • • 

The plastic surgeon had said there was no reason to wait, so we didn't, and three weeks into our Berlin stay I realized I was late. I stood alone in the bathroom for a minute disbelieving, staring at the dark blue lines, then ran into the bedroom and tackled Eli at his desk.

It occurred to me that night as I was falling asleep that I must have believed on some level that I could have only one or the other, a fixed head or a child. Because all I could think of now was,
I get to have both
. The timing felt perfect and a bit like magic. A successful surgery, then right away, this?

I didn't want my pregnancy to feel like any kind of redemption—that was way too heavy a burden for a child to bear. But I couldn't help but imagine sometimes that conception was a peace offering from my body to me, as though we were separate, or had been, and were calling a truce.
My body is doing this!
I'd think.
Not so broken after all!
I rushed to claim my physical self in a way I never had before. I didn't marvel at the miracle of pregnancy as much as I reveled in its normalcy.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along now. Just MAKING A BABY UNDER MY SHIRT.

It was all wonderfully elastic, the way Eli and I hadn't wanted children and then we did, the way I'd been healthy, then sick, and now healthy again. That after all that had happened, my life could snap back into shape, just a bit stretched out here and there—it felt impossible, and also only natural. Sometime in March, a new human would be here.

Megan was scheduled to arrive during my last week of classes. The three of us would be off to Prague for the weekend, after which Eli and I would travel on to St. Petersburg and Amsterdam before a final few days in Berlin. We hadn't told anyone about the pregnancy except for my mom, but we were planning on sharing the news with Megan. With nausea beginning to set in and so much time together coming up, we didn't see any way around it, and in any case, we were excited to get to say it out loud to our best friend.

We'd been tracking Megan's flight and knew she had landed. She'd be at our place any minute. “Do you want to say it, or should I?” I asked Eli as I ran to the bathroom. I couldn't wait to see my friend.

Something red
. I saw it before I saw it. My brain needed a sec to catch up.

“No,” I said out loud to no one.

Eli looked up an obstetrician and I got on the phone with a receptionist who spoke no English. I didn't have the words I needed in German, so I did my best and hoped to be understood:

“Ich habe keine Kinder, aber ich werde vielleicht im März ein Kind haben, und ich habe jetzt viel Blut gesehen.”
I don't have any children, but maybe in March I will, and I have just seen a lot of blood.
The doctor saw me right away, and by the following week, it was done. Meanwhile, Megan left for Prague without us.

The doctor had been gentle and kind. There was some comic relief thanks to our language issues. “Hmm . . . you know . . . Michael Jackson, mm-hm? Bye-bye, Michael Jackson?” he said when trying to communicate what they would use to anesthetize me during the procedure. “Ven you have hemorrhage . . . hm . . . lots of Blut, mm-hm? You vill go in hospital.” It took me a beat to realize that by “ven” he meant not the English word “when,” but the German
wenn
, “if.” (I watched the color return to Eli's face as I explained as much.)

We went in for a follow-up appointment right before we flew home. The doctor sat us down at his desk, pushed his patient notebook over to me, and thumbed through it quickly, like a flipbook. There were colored dots by many of the names. A blue dot meant one miscarriage, a yellow dot meant two, a red dot meant three or more, he explained. Almost every one of these women, he said, is now a mother.

I nodded, numbly. He told me that as many as one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage, that having a miscarriage didn't mean I was at any greater risk for another. He urged me to see this as a good thing. Sperm was meeting egg. This was excellent news. It was only a matter of time.

I wanted to find comfort in what he was saying, but all I could think was that this was proof. My body
was
broken. It was. I'd been foolish to think otherwise.
Of course I'm not supposed to reproduce. I'm not supposed to be here at all.

I spoke with my gynecologist at home. “I know things are hard now,” she said, “but soon, they will be perfect.”