14 Quotes by Judith Fertig

An orange day, a happy day, a brand-new day in the secret language that only the three of us seemed to understand."Mmmmm," Daddy said, taking a bite of his roll. "Orange wakes you up, but cinnamon makes you remember.

She couldn't see the homemade colored sprinkles, the tender yellow cake, or the pale pink frosting made with strawberry syrup enhanced with a little rosewater. Although our local strawberries weren't in season yet, I had conjured the aroma and taste of juicy berries warmed by the sun. I hoped this flavor would help the two old people return once more to their youth and the carefree feeling of a summer day.

A bit reluctantly, trying to leave my bruised ego behind, I was warming to the Appalachian idea.Bourbon and branch water. Dulcimer music. Wildflowers in jelly jars. Biscuits and country ham. That did have a certain charm.

I was starting to think of her as the "Goth Van Gogh" on a good day or "Vampira" on a bad one. She took a little getting used to.

Jett's artistic talent was as weighty and emphatic as the heavy black makeup she applied to her lips and eyelids.

People I had never seen before flocked in, their faces showing a longing you never saw for cake. People's eyes lit up for a cupcake, cake seemed to signal celebration. But their eyes got filmy, watery, misty when we handed them a slice of pie. Pie was memory. Nostalgia. Pie made people recall simpler, maybe happier times.

He opened the box and saw a tiny cake shaped like a bird's nest in three small round layers of tender, browned-butter vanilla cake with an apricot filling. A "nest" border of piped rum and mocha buttercream enclosed a clutch of pale blue marzipan eggs and a sugar-paste feather. The complicated yin and yang of rum and mocha, the "everybody loves" vanilla, Mr. Social white chocolate, tart and witty apricot, and artistic marzipan- all said "Gavin" to me.

At Rainbow Cake, January's special flavors would be dark chocolate and coffee, those pick-me-ups we all needed to start the day- or a new year. To me, their toasty-toasty flavors said that even if you only had a mere handful of beans and your life went up in flames, you could still create something wonderful.A little trial by fire could do you good. After all, if it worked so well with raw cacao and coffee beans, it could work for others, including me.

I didn't know until I licked the mocha buttercream from my third devil's food cupcake that this was the flavor of starting over- dark chocolate with that take-charge undercurrent of coffee.I could actually taste it, feel it. And now I craved it.