Weekend Update: MicroMoms

Recipe Card Microstories: Mother's Day Edition

May 10, 2025

Earlier this year, I invited the Cook & Tell community to submit their favorite recipe cards and stories in a Virtual Recipe Card Swap. To kick off Mother’s Day weekend, here’s a trio of mother-daughter recipes!

On Carrots & Crocs

Vicki Smith

, an artist, food-writer and accomplished home cook, was the first responder in our swap. Here’s what she had to say about her mother’s original carrot cake recipe.

My mother started making carrot cake in the 70s when it was popular. She had a shorthand for sharing recipes, omitting part of the directions if she thought they were self-explanatory. I have a couple of copies she sent over the years, with the directions becoming increasingly skimpier.
Carrot cake is a throwback that pairs well with my little kitschy Easter bunny figurine. My husband presented her to me, after one of his stops at a yard sale, as a joke, but I was quite taken with her crocs and basket of colored eggs and she has been on display ever since.
My mother’s recipe is easy to make in either loaf pans or a more festive round-layer cake and transports well to a family picnic.

Read more on the history of carrot cake, along with the recipe, in Vicki’s newsletter.

Easel to Table

Carrot Cake

Carrot cake was popular back in the 1970s when health food stores were popping up. It offered a hit of vitamin A and was perceived as being healthy compared to the bundt cake of the 60s. Its origin may date back to carrot pudding of medieval times when sweeteners were expensive and carrots were a substitute with their natural sugars according to carrotm…

3 years ago · 9 likes · 4 comments · Vicki Smith

The Mystery Woman

From one of my favorite bakers and food-writers,

Ruth Stroud

, comes a mysterious coffee cake.

My mother had many friends, but I don’t recall any named Gretel.
I found her coffee cake recipe in my mother’s notebook. Spanning nearly a half century, it’s filled with handwritten recipes, recipe cards and yellowed newspaper clippings. For me, it’s as precious as my family memories.
Like our Palo Alto kitchen, a beehive of activity: my mother at the hub with her Harvest Gold KitchenAid stand mixer, us kids at the Formica table.
I’ll never know who Gretel was—both she and my mother are gone now—but the buttery slices of her cake linger on palate and memory.

Here’s more from Ruth on her mother, Flora.

Ruthtalksfood Newsletter

Remembering Flora on Mother's Day

I don’t recall ever celebrating Mother’s Day as a child. Or maybe I do, but it wasn’t for my mother. We used to visit my grandmother Edith, my father’s mother, in Berkeley (she was Oma to us) and usually brought her a flowering pl…

2 years ago · 20 likes · 17 comments · Ruth Stroud

Note from a Ghost

And from Melissa Leebaert, a novelist in my writing group, a different take on carrot cake and the sweet story of a life well lived.

This note in my mom’s handwriting, with the recipe on the other side in mine, has been stuck to the side of my fridge for several years since it slipped out of an old, shared recipe book. I love how she says “I won’t be baking carrot cakes or banana breads…” Clearly, after cooking for a family of six for a bazillion years she knew what she no longer wanted to do. She went from a complete non-cook when she married to a renowned cook for years, then returned to simple and wholesome when her own years were winding down.
We’re lucky to have been loved and nurtured by such women.

I’d never had kids other than those with tails until I became the mom to my mom at age 50. This unexpected entry into motherhood was a bit like cooking without a recipe. The ingredients had been there all along: compassion, patience, unconditional love. But the instructions were learn-as-you-go.

In the end, it didn’t matter that I hadn’t been a mother before—I learned from the best. And Melissa’s right: We are lucky to have been nurtured by such women.

Your Pantry Pals,