My father longs for the Porcupine cake, a nine-layer almond cake that was one of my grandmother's specialties.

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.

As I hunted for my grandmother's Porcupine cake recipe, I began looking for her as well. I searched online for the record of her entry at Ellis Island. I paged through her prayer book. I called my relatives for their memories.

This what I have learned: She put up a bushel of peaches and did the ironing on the same day she gave birth to her fourth child. She had her hair done and did her washing every Monday. If her grandchildren left any yolk on their plates when they finished eating the eggs over-easy that she had prepared, she would scrape it off, scramble it and re-serve it to them. She kept an immaculate house -- clean baseboards, polished attic steps -- and she had semi-gloss on every painted surface in her house because it was easier to clean.

"I see this parallel between the cake and her personality," says my brother Tony. "Just like this cake was so carefully put together, so was she, so were her surroundings."

Tony's 18th birthday in 1979 was likely the last occasion for which Grandma made the Porcupine cake.

Getting tantalizingly closer

My aunt, Margaret Cronin, my father's only living sister, may have the recipe, but my first efforts to reach her were unsuccessful. I searched the Internet but found only cakes shaped like porcupines and hedgehogs. A post on eGullet, an online food discussion board, got me nowhere.

I called Marlene Parish, a culinary historian and food journalist in Pittsburgh. She called the Pittsburgh Regional History Center, hoping the Porcupine cake may have been common to the area's card-party circuit in the first half of the century. No such luck. Greg Patent, author of "A Baker's Odyssey: Celebrating Time-honored Recipes from America's Rich Immigrant Heritage," told me, "I never heard of anything like that." Erin Williams, the collections manager at the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, also found a hedgehog-shaped cake.

Then I contacted Jean Anderson, a cookbook maven who lives in Chapel Hill and is author of "The New German Cookbook," among many others. She suggested the Prince Regent's Torte, a 10-layer cake with apricot marmalade and buttercream frosting between each layer, as being a recipe my grandmother may have adapted. Anderson sent me the recipe but warned me about making almond brittle in wet weather: "You'll have no end of problems."

She was right.

When you bring a cooking question to Anderson, she takes it on as her own. When baking expert Nick Malgieri came to town a few weeks later, Anderson asked him if he had ever heard of a Porcupine cake. He had not but wondered if my grandmother adapted the recipe from a Hungarian cake called a Dobos Torte, a five- or more layer cake with chocolate buttercream frosting. With both cakes, the sponge cake layers are baked individually and baking powder is not used.

I called my father, excited that either of these cakes could be the basis for the Porcupine cake. He dismissed the idea. He says Grandma made three cakes and cut each in thirds, which likely means the cakes were sturdier than sponge cakes and the recipes called for baking powder.

And so, I settled on a basic yellow cake with American buttercream frosting, each flavored with almond extract. I soon learned I do not possess the skill to cut one cake in thirds. The best I can do is cut four cakes in half. My fourth attempt resulted in eight crooked layers and a cake that leaned to one side. I found a solution on my fifth try, using an embroidery hoop as a level and cutting the layers with a 10-inch bread knife. But this spring's rainy weather has made making almond brittle impossible. I came close, but I'm not sure I nailed it.

Finally last week, I got my Aunt Margaret on the phone. She thinks she has the recipe but hasn't been able to locate it. If she does find it, she warns the recipe is probably in German. Her memory differs a bit from my father's. She recalls a coffee flavor, slivered almonds sticking straight out from the sides of the cake and no brittle.

Aunt Margaret tried to make the cake once. "I swore I'd never do it again," she says.

I will try again. If I inherited a morsel of my grandmother's baking ability, I inherited all of her stubbornness.