05/27/2026
Goooooood afternoon my beautiful biscuits! Strawberry is the order of the day! Sourdough strawberry cake and sourdough strawberry lemonade 🍋 🍓 cookies too! Along with your usual favorites! I’ve just restocked my grain bin at Steam 'N Barrel Mercantile! ♥️
Today is an extra special day. Today is my paternal grandmother’s 95th birthday! 🎉 🎂 Some of y’all have been here long enough to know the story of my family’s special occasion cake pan, but for those that haven’t….buckle up buttercup as I imbue you with some of my family’s baking lore. My parents were childhood sweethearts. My daddy knew who he wanted to marry at an early age, and he outright told my mama when she was 12 (they played together as children, as did most of their many siblings) that someday he was going to marry her and he gave her a little tin heart ring that she still has to this day. My daddy made good on that promise when they were teenagers and wed my mother in the year nineteen hundred and seventy-four, in the year of our lord, respectively. 😉
My mama had long admired an aluminum cake pan that belonged to my father’s mother because her cakes came out perfectly every single time in that pan. Almost like magic. On the day they wed, one of the gifts Grandma gave them was that cake pan. It inadvertently became their “something old”. That cake pan is three generations deep at this particular juncture, and my mama made almost every single special occasion cake in that pan for our family, and many cakes that she sold as her side business at my father’s job as well. I made my first state fair blue ribbon winning pound cake in that pan at nine years old. A few years ago, after they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, my mama gave the pan to me. It’s deeply sentimental and has a lot of family history attached to it. So much so that I’m holding it in my profile picture. It’s the pan that started it all for my mama, and for me.
Grandma had no idea how much her sentimental gift would shape our futures back then, but she’s watched it all unfold through the years. 95 has never looked so good, especially on the spitfire of a woman that she is and has always been. Happy birthday ma’am! I can’t wait to celebrate you with the rest of our kin tonight! ♥️🎂🎉
If you’re lucky enough to have a grandparent, give them a big hug just because I told you so. Time moves faster than you think. Be kind, give grace, and stay beautiful my sweet biscuits. ♥️
