The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page A

to lay.
    The raspberry buns were a standard treat for my mother’s guests, and my mother knew the recipe so well she hardly needed reminding, so the instructions in the scrapbook were sketchy:
Roll out pastry into rounds. Put little jam in center. Roll little. Make cross on top.
This hardly described what I’d watched her doing. She’d roll out the raspberry bun dough and then cut the dough with a jar lid. Into each perfect circle of dough she’d place a dollop of jam and then roll the edges up, puckering them in the way you’d pucker up fabric to make a pouch, and pinch the dough together at the top. She’d cut a little cross on top, so the jam would ooze out as it cooked. When they were done, the raspberry buns looked like tiny precious pies and tasted of heaven. The smell of them coming out of the oven was more temptation than an appetite could bear. This is what I would do then, on the morning of Mrs. Bell’s visit, fill the kitchen with the warm, happy seduction of my mother’s little pies.
    While my mother took the wire egg basket out to collect eggs for her daffodil sponge cake, I paged quickly, impatiently, through the stiff pages of the scrapbook, looking for anything new, or something I might have missed, but avoiding the page near the front containing Sarah Kemp’s funeral notice and the warning of bear attacks. I flipped past the photographs of the king and queen and the various ghost stories my mother clipped from magazines, and went straight for my favorite page: the newspaper clipping of Ginger Rogers’s visit of the previous year, next to my mother’s recipe for quick Sally Lunn. There was plenty of room for additions on this page, but the only thing new was a sentence my mother had scrawled in sloppy blue ink that read, “Box of geraniums at open window keeps flies down.” It was a hint she must have picked up from some magazine. I touched the fuzzy photograph of Ginger Rogers, but lightly, so I wouldn’t smudge the newsprint. All that glamour so close to home. I hadn’t seen Ginger Rogers, of course. We hadn’t gone to town that day, but I wished with all my heart that we had. She was so beautiful, so foreign to anything I knew in the valley.
    My mother’s footfall approached the house, and I quickly laid the scrapbook as it had been, open to the raspberry bun recipe. Her wire basket was filled with eggs, and she put them carefully into the washbowl and scrubbed them clean with a fingernail brush, placing themone by one on the counter of the Hosier cupboard. Some cooks, to convince you of their miracle working, maintain that sponge cake is a difficult thing of chemistry, of eggs three days old and flour just so and the temperature and humidity just right, but making a sponge cake is the easiest thing in the world. A sponge cake is nothing but eggs, flour, sugar, and air; and if you’re new to the sponge cake, a little baking powder too, to ease its way against gravity. The secret is eggs, lots of eggs, and eggs we had no shortage of now that summer was almost on us. My mother used an even dozen in each daffodil cake, then two cups flour, and two cups sugar. But here she did experiment; some days felt like a little more flour or sugar, some days a little less.
    After separating the yolks and the whites into bowls, my mother added the ingredient of air, whipping the yolks until frothy, then adding half the sugar and flour and perhaps a little lemon juice or flavoring. In another bowl, she beat the egg whites until they stiffened, but not so much that the air bubbles began to break. She then added the remaining sugar and flour and a touch of real vanilla. There it was then: two frothy bowls of air and egg, one yellow and one white.
    There are two more secrets to the sponge cake: a knowledge of folding and a clean pan. A sponge cake is nothing without a clean baking pan. A spot of grease on the pan from some other recipe, and your sponge cake will come out flat. So wash your baking pan ever so