Grandpa takes the cake

The cake has two chocolate layers and two kinds of frosting. (Food styling/karoline boehm goodnick; dominic chavez/globe staff)

My grandfather didn't cook much. When the Faculty Wives Club at the university where he taught English literature put out a cookbook, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek recipe that involved throwing almost all the ingredients out. His oldest daughter, my Aunt Pamela, says he cooked "only when Mummy was busy having babies - that was the only time we got to have Chef Boy-R-Dee or anything like that." But he did make chocolate cake, and he made it with the belief that anything worth doing is worth making a big production of.

Grandpa's chocolate dribble cake with seven-minute frosting is a big production. It involves two layers of cake and two kinds of frosting. The first is spread on the cake as it's layered. The second is the dribble part, in which melted chocolate and butter are spooned over the first frosting. There are several places where things can go wrong - the egg whites must be folded in just enough, and my sister Britt says the "so-called seven-minute frosting" takes 45 minutes unless you start it over boiling water. But my grandfather's cake - rich and moist, with just-sweet enough sugar frosting, and the crackle and melt of the dribbled chocolate - was and is the dessert for every generation of my family.

One year, Grandpa entered his cake in a farmer's market competition in Lewisburg, Pa., and it won first prize. Aunt Pamela wasn't there but she heard about it from her sisters: "All these Pennsylvania Dutch women had brought in their cakes and they were just flabbergasted when Daddy won first prize," she says. "They said, 'What, a man made this?' "

The biggest chocolate dribble cake Grandpa ever made was for my Aunt Marianne's wedding. Even a run-of-the-mill size took ages. "He'd be beating away for what seemed like hours on end for that seven-minute frosting, with all this hot steam coming up all over the place," Aunt Pamela says. But the cake for the wedding was huge. I was about 10, and I'd been a flower girl in the ceremony, but as soon as Grandpa started slicing the cake I volunteered to help serve. The children got the first small pieces, to keep them quiet. After, say, the first 15 servings, Grandpa got bored with slicing, and started hacking off slabs. I got one of the biggest of all.

The last really big chocolate dribble blow-out was at my sister Nora's wedding a couple of years ago at our family's summer place in upstate New York. There were tons of aunts and cousins and everybody made the same dessert: chocolate dribble cake. I think there were eight. Some were better, some had mint (most of us thought that tasted like toothpaste). By the end of the evening, there was none left of any.