A Soft Piece of Keks
Egg whites transforming into bubbly snow-like foam. The mixer whisking them into a never-ending spiral.
“The sugar is not dissolving. Should I add more water,” I ask.
“No, it will become too watery, just continue mixing,” my mother says.
We are in the kitchen on the second floor of our house. I am mixing the ingredients of our traditional family pastry we call keks. My mother is at the table sifting the flour and adding baking powder and vanilla extract.
We have done this hundreds of times. We know exactly when to add which ingredient. It is like a waltz that my mother and I dance in the kitchen. We move graciously back and forth to reach that jar or open this cupboard.
For the regular spectator, we would look like a finely tuned mechanism in which the gears never hitch or stop. Little do they know we were fighting that day and that fighting is a regular occurrence between me and my mother.
“Why are your clothes on that chair? Put them in the wardrobe or in the laundry.”
“Get up and come to have breakfast.”
“I have told you hundred times to tidy this drawer.”
It doesn’t sound like much. But for me, it is the constant nagging of “do this and do that”, “when are you going to listen”, “I have told you a hundred times”, and my favorite “you never listen to me but when you tell me to do something I do it right away”.
My annoyance spikes up just by thinking about these moments.
I admit that I do some things out of spite just to annoy her. Leaving the clothes where she doesn’t like seeing them. Putting the laundry on the clothesline the way she doesn’t like having it. Taking every necessary ingredient out of the cupboards when cooking and leaving it on the countertop until I put the dish in the oven.
Okay, the last one is not out of spite. I like the creative chaos. Sheets of paper, pencils, and pens on every surface available in my room. Flour and sugar and eggshells everywhere in the kitchen.
Curiously, it is also the kitchen where my mother and I are the most civil. Perhaps it is the common goal of making something we both like and crave — a sweet thing — a keks or a cake or muffins. Perhaps the process of making it oils the gears of our mechanism.
***
The sugar is dissolved. The flour is sifted.
My mother takes the big sheet of baking paper with the flour. It has been the same for years. Between the baking occasions, it sits nicely tucked in the second drawer in the kitchen, a drawer I have tidied several times without her reminding me to do it.
She pours the flour into the mixture of dissolved sugar, eggs, oil, and water. I turn on the mixer. Small white clouds puff from the flour before it is wholly swallowed by the liquid mixture. I stir for several minutes and turn off the mixer. I check if some of the flour got stuck to the walls of the bowl. No. It is perfect.
“Should I add cocoa powder or ground coffee,” I ask.
“Sure. Pour some of the mixture into the baking pan and then add cocoa powder to the rest,” my mother instructs me.
I do just that. Then, I pour the cocoa part of the mixture into the baking pan and put it in the preheated oven.
One hour later.
I take the keks out of the oven. It is warm and soft and sweet. I cut it and see the shapeless splashes of brown here and there. A result of the cocoa powder.
I want to believe that the keks is a metaphor for the relationship I have with my mother. There are splashes of brown stuff here and there. Sometimes they take up an entire piece of keks. Other times they are just a speck. But they add to the overall flavor of the pastry, and everything is warm and soft, and sweet.
However, our splashes of brown do not add up to the taste of the keks. They take away from it. They make it salty and bitter and everything else keks is not supposed to be. They make it stale and hard to chew.
Eventually, this keks and all the others to come will be eaten.
I hope that I will have a few more soft pieces before the time comes.
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Frantsiska Kutevska is a third-year student at the American University in Bulgaria. She likes exploring human relationships through writing.
