D R A M A++Q U E E N

THE CAKE LADY'S CARAMEL CAKES WERE SWEET AND STICKY AND HEAVENLY -- LIKE SUMMERS ON THE CAROLINA COAST.

BY MAURINE SHORES | When I was growing up, we always spent a month of the summer on the North Carolina coast, in a house my mother's parents built the year she was born. It was an eight-hour drive from our home in the western part of the state, and we would always arrive famished, hot and sticky and cramped. Those first few moments of release from the car were sweetest. We would race through the sea oats and grass down to the water's edge, picking up sand spurs as we went. The Bogue Sound, with its familiar smells of rotting fish, salt and mud, was truly welcoming. Then we would race through the cottage -- its musty, closed-up smell gradually blown out by the sea breeze from all the windows my mom was opening. Everything we touched that summer was sticky -- sticky from the salty, dense air and from my mother's vacation from housekeeping.

All that I remember about those summers was lovely and desultory -- the laid-back attitude of the parents, who would sit around drinking daiquiris or gin and tonics in the cool of the evening, while we were given the freedom to ride our bikes up and down the street, abandoning them on the sidewalks to run in and out of houses. Or the way we felt coming home from the beach, sunburned and tired, but happy. Sometimes we would go fishing off the pier or sit on the porch and watch the boats go by. But my favorite memory of all from those summers was of the Cake Lady's caramel cakes. Within minutes of our arrival, my mother would be on the phone placing her order, her slim, not-yet-tanned legs crossed beneath her chic little Lily Pulitzer skirt.

"Better send me two," she would say, sitting by the hall table. "You know how Tommy loves your caramel cake." The Cake Lady made many cakes -- wonderful chocolate and yellow cakes by the dozen; strawberry, lemon and spice cakes; German chocolate and coconut and applesauce cakes. But her caramel cake was her true achievement -- and was probably the most important factor in my love of cooking besides, of course, my love of eating. The caramel cake was sublime, rhapsodic: a moist yellow butter cake with a thick, candylike layer of caramel frosting. I remember my mother begging the Cake Lady for her recipe, waving a $100 bill, down on her knees, promising never to give it to another living soul, promising to still order her caramel cakes during our summertime visits. My mother would have kept her word on this, undoubtedly, though the Cake Lady couldn't have known this. She has never given or sold it to my mother or to anyone else, as far as I know, and 30 years later she is making them still.

The first time I tried to duplicate that caramel cake was when I was seven or eight months pregnant with my first child. I had to pull a chair into the kitchen so I could sit down while beating the frosting, which never did come together properly. I was using an old Junior League of Charlotte recipe for hot milk cake, which had been handed down and adapted over the years. For the caramel icing, I was working with the recipe from "The Fannie Farmer Baking Book" on page 405 (I know this by heart), and I am working on it still, though I have tried other recipes as well. I know all about the components of caramel frosting -- no moisture in the air, fresh cream, an accurate candy thermometer. But the most important thing about caramel frosting is this: When you have mixed together the ingredients, washed down the sugar crystals from the side of the pot with a pastry brush, reached the soft (not hard!) ball stage, beaten the frosting for what seems like hours -- when you have done all this and the frosting comes together with a distinctive "glug" sound in the bowl -- then you have 20 seconds, no more and no less, to set that mound of frosting on your cake. If you don't move quickly, the frosting will harden into candy and you will stand there eating it, with tears running down your face, because at that point you have invested so much into it that there is really nothing else to do.

N E X T+P A G E: The Cake Lady shacks up!