Amina Brown

She agrees.

We're back in the kitchen together, hip to hip,

I tell her, I want to make a pineapple cake.

I find a from scratch recipe the closest to what I can think her cake would have tasted like.

We get in the kitchen together.

She starts remembering some things, how you've got to gently take your cake layer out of the cake pan, how you got to poke holes in that middle layer so your pineapple sauce will soak through just right.

She teaches me how to make an egg white frosting.

And we make a really delicious and really ugly cake.

The ugly part was a me thing, not a her.

I don't know how to frost a cake.

Which is why when my grandma turned 85, all of us have to gather together.

Her kids, her grandkids, her great-grandkids, we all gather together in a big old beach house, and now I'm the one in the family who cooks all the food that she taught me how to make.

So I slide up to her and I say, Grandma, what kind of cake you want?

And she said, now baby, you know I want a chocolate cake.

I want yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

And I said, you gonna get that cake and that cake is gonna be super moist.

I get in the kitchen, I've cooked all my things.

The cake is my last thing to make.

And as I'm stirring up this box mix, I'm just thinking, I'm one of the older grandchildren.

Maybe she started this cake mix thing for the younger kids.