Christmas Night 2023. After dinner at our half-and-half Judeo/Christian home, I brought out an apple turnover from an inspired Julia Child recipe. It was good- and pretty too. Some moments later, my husband Julian read me a story from the Wall Street Journal about LeeAnn Henrie Turner, a Forth Worth, Texas woman who started making sourdough bread during the pandemic, baking so many a day that she began putting them out on the driveway for neighbors to take home. As time passed, so many came that the newspaper included her in a story of people who performed acts of kindness. Turning to Julian, I said, that’s what I will do–give away cakes.
The next morning, Boxing Day 2023, I created a post on my neighborhood Facebook page, explaining that I made an excellent apple turnover for Christmas dessert and that I’d like to give the leftover half to the first person who comes to my house to pick it up. The only stipulation I had was that no money be exchanged. And quickly, lanky Bolan Boesky appeared on my front porch with a smile as wide as the Mississippi and got the first ‘cake.’
Five decades ago, I worked at a printing company in New York. In the evenings, I was learning how to bake with the incredible help of Julia Child, Jacques Pépin, and Maida Heatter. I learn best in isolation, so in my East Village tenement apartment, with a bathtub in the kitchen, I studied Genoise, flourless tortes, Paris-Brest, Bûche de Noël, Mille-feuille, choux à la crème, Reine de Saba and the especially lovely and quite delicious pithivier.
I enjoyed my fifteen minutes baking Diana Ross’ wedding cake in Switzerland and an edible two-foot-high Fabergé egg for Malcolm Forbes, which sat on the seat next to me as I delivered it cross-country. Many other stars have eaten my cakes. But that doesn’t hold a candle to the excitement I experience in my bones and heart when I bake for my neighbors in Birmingham, Alabama.
I am someone who has set few goals in my life, not for any other reason except, I guess, negligence. But in its way, that has worked for me. I literally fell upon making cakes for Glen Iris, the area in Birmingham where I’ve lived for twenty years. I approached any number of non-profits I could do this for, but it just wasn’t a good fit. More than anything, I just needed autonomy. So, the only caveat that exists now when someone comes for a cake is the no-money rule. It is so freeing, and I keep thinking, why didn’t I do this when I was fifteen?
I am told I had something to do with the neighborhood becoming “better” because of the cakes. That was not my plan. I did it because I like to give cakes away. If it changes the neighborhood, I am glad for that, of course, but I am reminded daily how I am changing because of them. When I hand over a box with purdy pink ribbon on top and a cake inside, I see the smiles of expectation and thrill on peoples’ faces, and I think they are changing me. Three days a week, I see perfect, happy, everyman/woman kind of people, and on my porch, it is all happiness 360°. It is heaven. And everyone wins.
That doesn’t hold a candle to the excitement I experience in my bones and heart when I bake for my neighbors in Birmingham, Alabama.