How to Make a Lamb Cake

Every Easter for as long as I can remember my grandmother made a lamb cake for Easter. Nana's lamb cake was a yellow cake or pound cake baked in a lamb mold, iced with white icing, and dusted with coconut flakes to give it a fluffy appearance. Nana would use a couple of chocolate morsels for eyes and a gumdrop for its nose and tie a ribbon round its neck. Her lamb cake was one little part of our Easter tradition, one that I never knew how much I loved until it was gone.

I decided that this year I would make a lamb cake for Easter, in honor of Nana. The first hurdle was finding a lamb-shaped pan. I tried all the local kitchen stores, but no one carried it. I could have ordered one from several suppliers I found on the internet, but it would not have arrived in time. Fortunately, my aunt Rita was able to locate one of Nana's set of lamb cake pans and brought it over for me last night.

I wished I had watched Nana make her lamb cake. In planning the process, I wasn't sure how to go about assembling the cake. Did I fill each half of the mold and then glue the layers together with icing? Or skewer them with toothpicks? That didn't seem quite right, so I pulled out Joy of Cooking. The editors of the recent edition apparently scorn the very idea of a lamb cake; there was no mention of it in the index. The 1974 edition, however, had several paragraphs about lamb and bunny cake molds. It turns out that you fill the front half of the mold with batter, put the top half on, and bake it as one piece, which makes a lot more sense than any of my ideas.

So I baked my lamb cake today. The mold didn't lock together, and I probably should have used twine to tie the two halves together because when the batter started to rise, some it spilled out along the edges. The lamb cake ended up rather flat in the back and smaller than it should have been. I couldn't get it to stand up so I had to lay it down.

"Just think of it as a sleeping lamb," I told Tab.

When I iced the lamb and added the coconut it looked pretty good, I thought. I used tiny blue candies for eyes and a pink one for the nose, then drew on a little mouth with red food coloring. There. All set for Easter tomorrow.

"I probably shouldn't leave this out for Max, huh?" I said to Tab. Our oldest cat Max has become a notorious food thief. I dare not leave any food out on the counter even for a little while. I'll put it in the microwave, I decided.

For some reason, and I'll never know why, I turned the microwave on with the lamb cake inside. By the time I realized what I had done, the microwave had been running for half a minute and the icing was liquefying and sliding off the cake. One eye was askew and the cute little mouth was now a messy red smear.

"That's not a sleeping lamb; that's a dead lamb," Tab commented when he saw it. "You know what Nana would say if she were here? She'd say, 'Oh, honey, that's a shame.' " He had Nana's inflection down, perfectly. I had to laugh.

Well, it's not a pretty cake, but I think it will taste fine. Next year's lamb cake will look better, I'm sure. Anyway, this one is the first of what I hope will be a long line of lamb cakes.

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