George Weigl, now 76, never ate a slice of that cake until he came home on leave from the Navy during the Korean War. "She never made it for the family until I was 21," he says.

As children in the 1940s, my father and his three younger sisters would lick the batter from bowls and spoons when my grandmother made the Porcupine cake for her former employers, the Goldsmith family. They owned department stores outside of Pittsburgh. Mrs. Goldsmith would order the Porcupine cake for her card parties. My grandmother made the cake only when someone was buying it. The ingredients cost $6, and Grandpa made just $60 a week as a tailor.

My grandmother, Anna, is a mythic figure in my family, renowned for her cooking and baking skills. She came to America from Germany in 1927. I never knew her. I was born in 1975, the youngest of 16 grandchildren. She had a stroke in 1981, which left her paralyzed on one side of her body and unable to talk. A few weeks before, that strong, stubborn 73-year-old German woman had been up on a ladder washing walls with my brother. After the stroke, she was stuck in a wheelchair.

"That was not my grandmother," my brother, Tony, recalls. She died in 1985.

My father first mentioned the Porcupine cake four years ago while visiting my sister in Pinehurst. I had made an almond torte to serve with coffee at breakfast. After tasting my cake, he told me that I had inherited my grandmother's touch for baking. Emboldened by my father's compliment, I determined to make him that cake. Of course, the recipe was lost, but I had no idea the lengths I would go to, to re-create this confection. Nor did I expect to find the grandmother I never knew along the way.

Everything in its place

Anna was not just adept at baking. She was prolific. For the annual church festival, she would use 25-pound bags of flour and sugar to make cakes and cookies for the bake sale. At Christmas time, she would mail 25 pounds of homemade cookies to each of her three daughters who lived out of state. Those packages filled with hazelnut horns, raspberry thumbprints and Lebkuchen, a German gingerbread, were a harbinger of the holidays for my cousins. When my parents sold their house six years ago, the pantry was filled with grandmother's canned peaches and peppers, almost 20 years old, marked by labels with her tilting script.

It must have been the almond flavor of my torte that sparked my father's memory of the Porcupine cake. He recalls nine layers of almond cake with butter almond frosting between each layer and the same frosting all over the outside. The sides of the cake were covered with toasted almond slivers like porcupine quills. For the top of the cake, Anna used her rolling pin to make half circles of almond brittle, which delineated where to cut the cake.

So I began my research, having no idea if this was my grandmother's creation or something that she had learned to make at the German resort where she worked as a cook before coming here. The recipes were difficult, and with each try, I found myself wondering about the woman who created this vexing cake.

I always felt as if I missed out on an essential Weigl family experience by never having known my grandmother, by never having tasted her nut rolls or the sugared doughnuts she made to mark the end of Lent. Unlike my siblings and my cousins, I will never have those experiences. The best I can do is get to know this exacting woman by trying to re-create her recipes in my own kitchen. Maybe, just maybe, I can prove I inherited some of her skills.

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