Shiva Cake

One of the traditions regarding a shiva house is that no food that enters the house can leave; I believe this is meant to encourage people to come and support and comfort the family. Couple that with another tradition of friends and distant family sending food, along with all of our friends and family having a generous desire to help feed and support the family, and you've got a recipe for a lot of food. Like, far more than can be possibly eaten. We've received kind gifts of every edible variety -- enormous trays of cookies, chocolates, honey cake, mandel bread, danishes, cupcakes, bagels, chicken, fish, mediterranean foods, soups, salads, entire sliced loaves of bread, and even fully catered meals served by kind family friends. Fruit baskets of every shape and size (including my first first-hand experiences with the tasty sculptured fruits of Edible Arrangements), crackers and cheese, and even a salami or two have completed the experience. Needless to say, even at our height of 10 family members in the house, we weren't really making a dent. We keep trying to encourage visitors to "help" us by enjoying the wide array of food; Jewish guilt doesn't really allow for even bereavement to get in the way of concern about potential food waste.

Strangely, the largest quanity of any one item has been a funnel/bundt cake. It's really quite tasty, but the frequency is a little astounding: through the various trays and platters, I believe we've received three full cakes plus a fourth one that was pre-cut into pieces as part of a cookie tray. (We're also convinced that some tasty muffins we enjoyed this morning may have used the same batter.) My brother and I have taken to calling this prolific dish "shiva cake"; my mom reports that apparently one of the major caterers in town makes a single type of 'cake' (does anybody else think cakes usually involve frosting?), which may explain why we've seen it so often. We've tried to brainstorm creative ways to serve it so people will eat it; the fully intact ones lurking in the fridge didn't even have a chance. On a related note: among the deserts, other than the shiva cake, every one I've seen (even among the variety trays) was unique, which is quite impressive.

Speaking of food, I found this hilarious -- Jones Soda, which I believe is Seattle-based, recently announced that they're once again doing holiday-themed flavored sodas. I'm not sure how nationwide they are, but these are the folks that, in addition to letting random people mail in pictures for their bottle labels, have offered turkey-flavored soda each Thanksgiving for the past few years. Some people apparently actually seek this stuff out as more than a novelty -- scary. Anyway, for the holiday season this year, they're offering Chanukah and Christmas-themed soda packs. I'm not sure which is more funny -- the Chanukah offerings (and dig the packaging with the 12 tribes on the side) that include Jelly Doughnut and Latke (!) flavors [and even a "dreidl inside!"], or that the Christmas pack's Ham flavor is kosher. Good stuff.


Laughter is good medicine for difficult times such as these, so we've also occasionally cracked jokes about potential products we could market using the knowledge we've gained in the last week. In particular, the major preparation for the house was to cover all of the mirrors -- and when all of the closet doors are mirrored, this leads to a lot of mirror covering, along with worries about taping to painted walls and such. We came up with two excellent ideas, neither of which ended up panning out at the time, but which B and I may look at marketing in the future:

1. Shiva Spray. That spray-on snow that gets used around Christmas time on windows seemed like a good way to handle this. Of course, even though the local stores are already blaring Christmas tunes and have all of their decorations out and ready for purchase, we were apparently a little too early for them to stock the spray-on stuff.


2. Shiva Curtains. Again, since the mirrors are on doors, attaching them directly meant that they were falling off every time we opened a closet. (The end solution was to use some 3M removable sticky tape and lots of sheets/pillowcases.)

We also joked a bit about the opportunity for "shiva crashers," particularly with all of that food, until we had a very touching visit from one yesterday. Two of B's close friends in NY have a network of friends/business relationships across the country -- yesterday they called one who lives near us, instructed her first to assemble a fruit basket, and then to print out and personally deliver a condolence message. She stayed for the evening service, which I've been leading and have each night concluded by asking everyone in attendance to introduce themselves and share a memory of my father. When it came to her, she thanked everyone there for introducing her to a very special man she might have never otherwise known.