clara ward

Note from Cat: I’m so pleased to see Be The Sea out in print. I read an early version and it’s a lovely book. Please pick it up or request it through your local library!

A Yule log cake features prominently in my new novel, Be the Sea. While preparing it, four characters share bits of their history involving kitchens and cooking.

Kai, an outgoing enby poly pansexual from Hawai’i says, “Where I grew up, I loved everyone’s kitchen except mine.”

Aljon, a quiet ace sailor turned ship’s cook from the Philippines responds, “I felt safe in our kitchen and extended that to others.”

They’re both vegan, and Matt, who loves to feed people and is simultaneously making his second and third cakes for Yule, is Pagan. So the cake they make together is vegan, filled with pistachio cream spiraled inside chocolate cake. It’s frosted with whipped chocolate, applied in thick swoops with a knife, then textured using the tines of a fork to resemble bark. Powdered sugar is dusted on top as if there’s been a light winter snow; after all, this is a Yule log cake.

In truth, my household makes the same cake fashioned as…a groundhog.

Why? What’s the truth behind my fictional cake?

First, like my story’s point of view character, Wend, I love chocolate but grew up with a single mom who had little interest in or time for cooking, let alone baking. Second, and completely unrelated to my novel, my mom had a peculiar obsession with Groundhog Day (the holiday, not the movie). As she told it, this arose from a chance encounter with a newspaper reporter in San Francisco in the ‘60s who was asking passersby on the street if they knew what day it was. Evidently, the moment in my mom’s life when she felt most seen and affirmed was when she answered correctly that it was February 2nd, Groundhog Day.

I will never know if my mom would have identified as enby or ace (although I have my suspicions) because she passed away in the early ‘90s. What I know is that she made exactly one kind of cake. I don’t make it the same way she did, but once a year, for Groundhog Day, my chosen family chooses from several options for chocolate roll cakes. The tines of a fork pluck at the frosting until it looks like fur. A diagonal slice through the center makes one cake into two, each with a sloped face that can be decorated with nuts for ears and jellybeans for eyes.

In different times and different kitchens, each of us may share our own truths. We will see the same cake in new and different ways. And sometimes, in the eyes of a reporter or a groundhog, we will feel seen.