Comfort is comfort

Part 2: Jane's streusel cake

Hi everyone, Naomi here. I’m taking over Melanie’s regular Meals in the Mail dispatch this week (and am a day and a half late to boot), as Melanie is miserably sick with Covid and is doing her best to heal, rather than bake. We both wish you all the very best (and good health!) for the coming festivities this weekend. xo

Dear Melanie, I was so sorry to learn how sick you were feeling. Covid is just a rotten, rotten grinch of a virus, isn’t it, seeming to attack from all angles and with a malice that is the exact opposite of the seasonal goodwill.

I’m sending you love and best wishes for a speedy return to good health… and extend that to everyone who is unwell or suffering at this time. It was a sad and unintentional coincidence that while I was baking Jane’s cherry streusel cake today in your stead - a cake she said was traditionally taken along to funerals - people we care about were burying a loved-one across town, someone who had died entirely too young and too soon.

It’s a terrible thing, witnessing the suffering of others, isn’t it. The sadness belongs to them and to those nearest to them, it’s not ours. It’s not about us. And yet we are left with the helplessness of seeing somebody else’s sadness and knowing there’s not a single thing we could do to lift the sorrow.

That helplessness leaves a kind of melancholy of its own, and that’s where I am as I write to you today. It’s not about me and it never will be, but neither is the sadness of others something I can ignore and go about my day without it weighing down.

So as I kneaded the dough for the streusel cake, working it over in my hands until it became a soft, silky ball, I thought about the families who were mourning across town. Warm and bitter morello cherries in a thickened syrup, spooned over the dough like a weighted blanket, nestled into the pan, finally topped with a sweet, cinnamon-tinted crumble mixture like the softest of kisses on a forehead.

Jane’s letter told me to let the dough rise a second time while I waited for the oven to warm up, so that’s what I did, and then I popped it in to bake for 25 minutes.

We are all about the comfort food today. I made the children cheesy soldiers for lunch, knowing the heavy dessert that was to come, while they relaxed watching Christmas movies on the TV. Yesterday was a big and busy day for them, and they are in full “recovery mode,” still wearing the clothes they slept in last night.

I pulled the streusel cake out of the oven when the crumble on top (the streusels) had turned golden-brown, let it cool in the tray for about ten minutes, then served it warm with a dollop of cream on top.

Following Jane’s advice, I had reduced the ingredients by two-thirds (which, incidentally, was easier said than done: how does one divide an egg into thirds??), but that still made quite a large cake. Jane says it freezes well but there’s no room in my freezer (it’s two days before Christmas, after all), so I’m going to wrap it up and take it to a friend’s place when I visit her this afternoon.

I wish I could share this comfort-cake with you, too. The three distinct layers are made up of bread (silky and subtle), sour cherries (tart, and pop-in-the-mouth juicy), and crumb (crunchy and sweet - my daughter said, “they taste like Anzac biscuits”), that all seem to melt into each other when you eat it warm from the plate.

There’s a comfort to this cake, a stick-to-your-ribs kind of nurture, that somehow makes sense as a food to eat when you’re sad. Or on an icy winter’s evening.

We of course ate ours on a warm summer’s afternoon, but comfort is comfort, whatever the season.

Yours truly,
Naomi x