Aunt Glad’s Teacakes

The glass cookie jar would rattle even when you put the lid on ever so gently. There was no such thing as sneaking a teacake from Aunt Glad’s house. She kept her teacakes in jars and sometimes in a leftover Christmas-looking red and silver tin can. There really never seemed to be enough of them. The buttery texture melted in your mouth like nothing else. Anytime we would visit her, I would make a beeline to the cookie tin. She’d have them carefully placed in there with wax paper to keep them fresh. And, like my cousin Terrie says, nothing went as good with her teacakes than one of Uncle Hoyt’s Double Colas!

Aunt Gladys made more than just teacakes, she was by far one of the best bakers I’ve ever known. She didn’t use fancy pans or even precise measurements. She baked with her heart, not by recipes from a magazine. Aunt Glad was the recipe writer, the trendsetter and gold standard of bakers. One of her most famous recipes was a six layer chocolate cake and she taught me how to make it when I was only twelve years old. With no children of her own, she used to tell me that the recipes had to live on. I can remember practicing the cake in her kitchen, where she measured the layers using an antique china teacup to divide the batter. Early on, she made her cake the old fashioned way with homemade batter but as she aged, she found that a Duncan Hines cake mix worked just as well. She taught me to crack the eggs separately, so that rogue eggshells wouldn’t taint the batter. She taught me how to “eyeball” the batter in the teacup so that it would bake evenly. Aunt Glad even coached me through making my first cake as a newlywed over the phone.

What I didn’t realize until I was much older was that Aunt Glad was a teacher. She took the time to teach me the skills of an old fashioned cook. But, I was too young at the time to realize what a precious gift she passed on to me, and took her knowledge for granted. I learned the cakes and a few pies, but the teacakes seemed out of my reach as a novice baker. I didn’t want to attempt to make the teacakes, because I just knew they wouldn’t turn out like hers. I was too scared to learn the secret to the buttery goodness, so I never asked to be taught. She would try to get me to learn and tell me that the recipe was really simple, just a little flour, butter, and eggs. Intimidation of the unknown prevented me from learning that recipe, and haunts me today when I have a craving for a taste of the past.

I think about the things that I am passing on to my children and the memories that they will have. I don’t want them to be too scared to attempt things that may seem like a stretch. I want them to be confident enough in themselves to just go for it, whether its things they learn from me or some of their other family. Most of all, I want to have the patience and kindness that Aunt Glad showed me. All too often, I find life moving at a speed that seems too fast for comfort. Days come, and days go, sometimes they run together when things are really busy. I want to slow things down a bit, and teach them the things that will really matter in life. I want them to understand at a young age that life is finite, and some of the people they love the most won’t always be around. They need to know to enjoy being children, and enjoy learning things that may not be really exciting from a child’s eye view, recognizing that the things they learn as children will be some of their best memories as they grow older. If I had known as a child that Aunt Glad wouldn’t always be around, I would have learned how to make those teacakes and recorded the process on video, for future generations to enjoy. It’s up to me now, to work on that recipe and take what I know about baking, all that I learned from Aunt Glad, to make those teacakes. Most of all, it’s up to me to be the teacher for my boys and encourage them to learn to make the teacakes.