This time I will not talk about a recipe to make a rich cake of that brown, sweet and creamy substance that in other times was a delicacy of gods and now is a divine gift for mortals, this time I want to talk about memories, those feelings that come to mind when you return to taste that dish or dessert that takes you to an unforgettable moment of your life, where the simplest thing seems to you the greatest treasure in the world. For me it is undoubtedly my grandmother's chocolate cake, it was magical, not only because it was made with love but also because it was the birthday gift that my pretty old lady always offered me on my special date as she used to say.
I remember that she used to make her own chocolate, she would ask me to go to the market to buy the base paste of this fruit, a block as hard as a brick but with the characteristic aroma that I love so much. As it warms up, the cocoa paste or liquor softens to the creamy consistency we know and that's when my grandmother would work her magic and I would help her by tasting the ingredients and cleaning the containers with my tongue. My brown stained face along with my huge smile betrayed happiness for my grandmother's masterpiece.
Something I admired about my grandmother was her incredible precision in integrating the ingredients, without the need of measuring cups or gram scales, she knew how to measure the quantities to perfection based on her experience as a pastry chef and chocolatier, on the other hand her recipe was printed in her brain, in fact nothing was forgotten, no detail of the cake was left behind. She taught me to recognize a good baking just by the aroma, which perfumed her whole house, the neighbor's and the neighborhood's, one of the reasons why on my birthday there were always so many people present when it was time to blow out the candles, is that no one wanted to miss tasting, even a little of that dark delight.
As the years went by, my pretty old lady lost her physical faculties, the lucidity of her mind slowly but irreversibly left her, she forgot all her recipes, the faces of her loved ones, but the only thing she always kept inside her head until the moment her soul left her body was the recipe for her chocolate cake. Another birthday is coming, it's been more than 20 years since my grandmother left for heaven but her chocolate cake is still alive through me, a nice way to bring her back here, among those of us who love and miss her through her most representative and sweetest legacy.
