Merry Christmas!

Back in Ohio at my mom's for the holidays. Baking away from my own kitchen is always interesting, but baking at my mom's was definitely easier than baking at Randy's. I credit age and gender for her well-prepared kitchen. All I had to supply was the ginger.

This week's cake was a gingerbread cake. As most people know, the gingerbread used to make gingerbread houses is actually not delicious at all, because it has to be tough to provide structural stability. So Dr. Robinson found a recipe for this cake, which is as soft and spicy as you imagine gingerbread should be. It's full of interesting ingredients: ground and crystallized ginger, molasses, black pepper, dark brown sugar. It was easy to make (a welcome break after the last cake debacle)--the toughest part was chopping the crystallized ginger. It smelled delicious while baking, and came out moist and spicy and excellent--particularly when served with Great Lakes Christmas Ale Ginger Snap ice cream. Yum!

In this chapter, Dr. Robinson talks about the end of two family traditions: the family vacation to a cottage in Michigan, because the cottage owners decided to stop renting it out, and the last gingerbread house building party, because her daughters were less enthusiastic and outgrowing the tradition. This year, I too am feeling the end of family traditions. I used to love Christmas time, and our own unique family routine: dinner and family presents Christmas Eve, then Santa's gifts Christmas morning followed by an afternoon of movies. Church Christmas morning when I was younger, then Midnight Mass when we were old enough to stay up. Way too many types of Christmas cookies. But things change: new travel requirements, financial concerns, houses, churches, relationships--I feel like I am struggling to hold onto the traditions that we used to have, desperate to not let them slip away. But sometimes change has to happen. Who knows if I will even come back to Cleveland next year? When you have to make room in your life for someone else, there must be compromise, which automatically leads to change. I know that I need to let go and allow new traditions to form. It's just hard--it solidifies the transition into real adulthood.

When my mom tasted the gingerbread cake, she immediately said, "You can make this every year!" So maybe we've already started a new tradition. If so, it's certainly a delicious one.