Ayun Halliday’s Dirty Sugar Cookies Virtual Book Tour

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This week, Brooklyn-based writer (and erstwhile traveler extraordinaire) Ayun Halliday debuted her fourth book, Dirty Sugar Cookies : Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste, which “takes readers into the unpredictable mind and comical experiences of a true anti-foodie, giving even the most hopeless cooks a moment of relief from self-criticism, and the least discriminating eaters a reality check.” If it’s like any of her past books, it should be funny stuff!

Today, for my stop on Ayun’s virtual book tour, I’m debuting one of her previously unpublished travel-food stories, “Tommy’s 21st Birthday Cake”…

Tommy’s 21st Birthday Cake

By Ayun Halliday

After a couple of months in Southeast Asia, Isaac and I had hit that point that’s not so much homesickness as a longing to transport one’s closest friends to one’s vacation spot. Sometimes it’s possible to achieve a pretty good facsimile with people you’ve only just met. We had succeeded in doing so with an international cast from our Koh Phangan guest house, but on our final evening’s revels, I accidentally destroyed the illusion by knocking boots with Erik, a handsome Swede, in the Gulf of Thailand. (Sometimes it doesn’t pay to go with the flow.) Naturally, I denied everything as hotly as my hangover would permit aboard a boat bound for the mainland, but Isaac wasn’t fooled. I was miserable. Having sullied our happy memories of that particular bunch of insta-friends, I felt we didn’t deserve another.

Two weeks later, we found ourselves in a remote guesthouse a few miles outside of Pai. It was brand new, and Sam, the owner, was having trouble convincing the Lonely Planet hordes to try his place over the ones endorsed by the guidebook. The only other guests were Tommy, a ponytailed American lad, and Simon, a Bangkok-based Australian who was old enough to be bald. (Which is to say somewhere around thirty, otherwise known as really, really old.) The first afternoon, we were fairly stand-offish, reading, playing solitaire and speaking of hill tribe treks as if they were something we would make independently of each other, but the ice gave way as the sun set. Sam broke out the rice whiskey, Isaac broke out his guitar and Simon broke out a packet of twigs and herbs to add to the whiskey. He’d bought it in the market, charmed by the label’s boast: Tiger Power Improve Your Sex! It was some strange shit. Its medicinal value is debatable and its claim overstated, but it did seem to draw our little group together into a cohesive and tightly bound whole. We laughed. We cavorted. We added innumerable verses to a little anthem we’d made up about Mountain Lodge, and at Sam’s urging sang it for two solid hours. We nearly came to blows, but things worked out okay, when Simon backed down, admitting that perhaps Isaac shouldn’t be held personally responsible for U.S. foreign policy.

We spent the next few days calling on various hill tribe families whose children Sam taught on an intermittent basis. We drank moonshine from an elderly lady’s still. We bathed in streams. We rode elephants, ate a civet, and sang that fucking Mountain Lodge song another million or so times. It amazed me, given how close we’d become, that Tommy waited until we were tramping back up the road to the guesthouse to let it slip that it was his birthday.


“What, today?” I cried. “Happy birthday! Why didn’t you tell us earlier? How old are you?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Twenty-one!? That’s a biggie!” On the spot, I secretly resolved to throw Tommy the birthday party his friends would have thrown, had he been home in North Carolina. The guys headed off to rest after our long trek. Meanwhile I secured Sam’s permission to take over the kitchen, a semi-detached lean-to equipped with a low stool and a propane hot plate set up on the dirt floor. “Okay, let’s see, what do we got here?” I scanned the shelves for likely cake ingredients. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself serving Tommy the flourless chocolate cake I had made for my friend, Lisa Hickey’s 21st birthday, a massive culinary undertaking that had called for a dozen egg yolks, a pint of heavy cream, twenty dollars worth of chocolate and nearly a fifth of Jack Daniels. Unfortunately, I had neglected to tuck the recipe into the Ziploc bag that held Xeroxed copies of our passports, traveler’s check registers and my birth control prescription. Believe it or not, I had struck out for foreign lands without a single cake recipe whatsoever. I would have to wing it and, unfortunately, I didn’t see much to wing it with. Salt. Some pineapple jam. A can of Milo.

“You don’t happen to have an oven anywhere around here somewhere, do you?” I asked Mountain Lodge’s de facto cook, Sam’s teenage nephew, Nok. Nok, a soft-spoken soul who had only recently mastered scrambled eggs and fruit salad, pursed his lips anxiously. Clearly, he wanted to help, but as usual he had absolutely no idea what the farangs were talking about. “Okay, so we’ll make a layer cake,” I declared, determined to see things through.

“Laya cake,” murmued the sizeable crowd of local onlookers who had gathered to witness the procedure.

“Yeah. Okay. So, anyway, this is a bit different than the way I’d do things at home … Nok, do you have any flour?” He pursed his lips and trembled. “Ground up wheat? You know, like for baking? Or, um, pancakes?”

“Banana pancake?” he cried, snatching a griddle with palpable relief. “Yes! I can make for you!”

“Oh, no, I was more thinking that if you had flour, I could maybe use it to make a cake or a cake-of-sorts for Tommy’s birthday.”

“Tommy birthday,” the chorus echoed solemnly.

“Yeah, this ought to work,” I bluffed, peering into the dented cardboard box Nok pulled from a basket in the corner. I think it might have been Thai Bisquick. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but it felt like it was too late to start backing out and you can bet all eyes were on me as I whipped up a sludgy batter. Despite the addition of the entire can of Milo, it tasted disappointingly non-fudgy. Maybe it would fudge up as it cooked.

Nok was looking worried again. I got the feeling he wasn’t supposed to let a guest decimate the pantry, but was too shy to say so. Maybe I should offer to pay for the ingredients. In theory, mortaring a dozen or so Milo-sweetened pancakes with pineapple jam was an inspired attempt to recreate a tradition from home. My old cultural anthropology professor would have been so proud. In practice, however… Well, let’s just say, my grand gesture was beginning to seem like a colossal pain in the ass for everyone involved. “Nok, do you have any candles?”

“Only stove,” he whispered, stricken.

“No, I meant for on top.” He looked at me like there were monkeys flying out of my ass. “It’s something we do in my country.”

“On top of what?”

“The cake. We call them birthday candles.” Nok nodded, chewed his lower lip, then consulted with several of onlookers. They became very animated, but also looked worried, which in turn worried me. “Nok, listen,” I attempted to back pedal, “It’s no big deal. We don’t have to have candles. I’ve got some rolling papers that I could twist up so they look like candles.” Again, my cultural anthropology professor would have been so proud. “I can light them up and Tommy can blow them out. It’ll be great. I mean, he’s not even expecting a cake, right?”

Right! Because boy, was he in for a big disappointment if he was! By no stretch of the imagination was the monstrosity I’d concocted “cake”. Whatever the assembled crowd may have thought of the States before, a few minutes in the kitchen with me had probably lowered their opinion by at least a couple notches. Yes, we had produced Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Levis, but look at what we considered food.

Well, there was no help for it now, no way to travel back in time to the moment when l could’ve wished Tommy many happy returns of the day, and left it at that. That’s what I’d have done on home turf. Back in Chicago, baking a birthday cake for someone you’ve known a mere four days is far less acceptable than, say, joining them for an impromptu road trip that winds up in a Vegas wedding chapel. It’s obviously too much too soon. But in the backwoods of Thailand, with no official friends around to mark the occasion, it’s an all or nothing proposition, and true to form, I had waded in without thinking and committed myself to all.

Etiquette holds that it’s always a bad idea for a hostess to acknowledge her mistakes, so at the appointed hour, I steeled myself to join the boys at the Tiger Power picnic table. I wished I had some Tiger Power now. Taking a deep breath, I emerged from the kitchen, bearing a plate on which a desultory column pancake listed, looking nothing like a birthday cake. I suppose it could have passed for a malignant tree fungus. “Tommy, in honor of -”

My speech was cut short by the arrival of a motorbike, which tore up the dirt road at top speed and screeched to a halt a few yards from where we sat. Had it been a horse, it would have been gasping and heavily lathered. The driver dismounted without cutting the engine and bore down on us, waving a white plumber’s candle the size of my wrist.

“Tommy birthday candle!” Nok cried happily.

“Birthday candle? Oh wow, you guys,” Tommy said, now that he understood the significance of the jam-soaked flapjack pile. “Wow. You guys are too much.”

I took the candle and jammed it down through the layers as best I could. The effect was far from Martha Stewart, but then, so am I. “Isaac, pass me your lighter. Hoo, boy, that wax starts dripping right away, huh?” I turned to our Thai friends. “Now we sing,” I explained.

They waited politely as Tommy’s fellow travelers serenaded him in their exotic Western way, then Sam clapped his hands and launched into the well-worn Mountain Lodge Song, which had accrued eighteen verses over the last few days, each separated by a chorus that went

Mountain Lodge
Mountain Lodge
Mountain Lodge
Mountain Lodge
Mountain Lodge!

It was so queer. It was so fun. By night’s end, we’d tacked on three more verses, one about Tommy becoming a man, one about hating to say goodbye, and one in which Nok became famous for baking cakes with Milo and pineapple jam. “I’m like, blown away,” the birthday boy said as we were all finally turning in for the night. I knew what he meant. His 21st birthday was special for all of us, because we knew we’d never see each other again, despite numerous and drunken protestations to the contrary. I remember that night far better than I remember anything that might have happened last Thursday. Perhaps rice whiskey aids in retention. As for the cake, it wasn’t so much edible as totemic, a recipe I’ve never needed to write down.

Posted by | Comments Off on Ayun Halliday’s Dirty Sugar Cookies Virtual Book Tour  | June 3, 2006
Category: Travel Writing

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