Like so many mothers of the depression, my mother had the ability to make something so wonderfully delicious, even when it first appeared, the cupboard was bare.  Often when I had ran the three miles home from school, my empty stomach would be growling as I searched the cupboard for something to tide me over until supper.  There never seemed to be anything to eat.  Being Swedish, the coffee pot was usually on, so I would get a few soda crackers, put some butter on them that we had churned, and dunk them in a cup of steaming, hot coffee with cream.  Oh, that made the soda crackers taste so good! However, it did something odd to the coffee that made you not  want to drink it.

Of the many tastes during those early years, that I still remember, one stands out in my memory more than others.  Cup cakes … chocolate cup cakes.  They were absolutely the best, so good you could die for one.  Whether it was the fact that Mom made the frosting from scratch or just the combination of the tastes, they were just so unique.  However, I wasn’t the only one that liked them.  Going to a country school, hot lunches were unheard of so we all carried our lunch in brown paper bags.  There might be a dozen or more bags lined up in a row, on a shelf in the hallway.  My bag usually contained a peanut butter sandwich and a chocolate cup cake.

Too often when I ate my lunch, the cup cake would be missing and I would ask my mother if she forgot to put it in my bag.  She assured me she had included it for my lunch.  That’s when I discovered someone was getting into my bag and eating my cup cake.  Telling this to my mother we decided to find out who that person was.

With a twinkle in her eye and a smile on her face, she revealed her plan.  Instead of putting the normal chocolate icing on, we took the contents of a package of X-Lax, melted all of it and spread it over a cupcake. With some colored sprinkles on top, it looked quite tempting and inviting.

Sure enough, the next day, one person excused himself from class for a bathroom break.  Instead he stepped into the hallway and got into my lunch sack and ate my enhanced cupcake.

At lunch time, I looked into my brown bag and with a devilish grin on my face, placed another chocolate cupcake, similar in appearance, that I had secretly carried with me.

The person who had pilfered my first cupcake sheepishly watched me eat my lunch, including a cupcake that looked almost like, but very different, than the one he had eaten earlier.

After missing two days of school, it was revealed that the culprit had been so sick he thought he would die. He didn’t of course, and with his taste for chocolate having been diminished, once again I was able to enjoy the cupcake that I could die for.