This past weekend, we filmed a long-planned trial segment to see how we’d do with a baking episode. My partner in crime creating, is my cousin Paula. She and I started baking together when we were quite young… somewhere around 9 and 10 years old. And we usually conducted our joint baking ventures when we were babysitting our younger siblings . All us kids (8-12 of us) would be together in one house…either hers or mine… while our mothers were out shopping (or just enjoying themselves with a kid-free time). We had already been cooking and baking at a young age with our mothers, so we were quite responsible and knew what to do unsupervised. (In the photo above, Paula is on the left, me on the right, and that’s her oldest brother between us. She and I were about 19 & 20.)
.
We mostly baked what we call ‘box cakes’… the Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines cake mixes. It was always a 2 – layer cake, with frosting made from powdered sugar mixed with a little butter and milk, and tinted with food color.
We’d assemble that two layer cake with frosting and hold our breathes… to no avail. That darn top layer would always split in half and slide off ! We started using toothpicks to keep it anchored, however that split top layer continually plagued us.
Those times of making ’box cakes’ has been long gone for years now, and we each do all of our cake-baking now from scratch. So we did enough footage for 2 episodes… I did a German Chocolate Cake, and she did a Coconut Pineapple Cake.
Oh, the title of this blog post? We were both born in Mobile, Alabama. Our families are southern and our mothers’ taught us the Southern way of cooking. So Paula came up with the name for this fledgling cooking venture –Strictly from the South. Though we were both born and lived in the South in our young years, our families migrated to California to a little blue-collar city called Compton. Here is where we began and completed our k-12 education. So we joke … are we indeed strictly from the South, or are we instead,.. Straight Outta Compton?
