Perfect Mothers Bake Perfect Cakes

By Kat Echevarría Richter, May 6, 2026

To celebrate our son’s first birthday, we settle on a London theme. By this, I mean that I settle on a London theme and my husband knows better than to object. I sketch a three-tiered layer cake, just like they do on The Great British Baking Show; it will be light blue fondant with Union Jack pennants and a fleet of double decker busses. The pièce de résistance will be the cake topper: a miniature crown molded from gold fondant and bedecked with edible pearls. This, mind you, makes perfect sense because our son was born within twenty four hours of Kate Middleton’s third baby and I had always intended to marry Prince William and my husband and I were very into watching The Crown on Netflix during the rare nights that we didn’t immediately fall to sleep after putting our newborn to bed.

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“You have to try these,” I tell a fellow South Philly boy-mom who lives across the street.

“What are they?” she asks.

“Brownies!”

She’s skeptical. They don’t look like brownies, but that’s because they’re made entirely of dates, tahini, and cocoa powder. In my twenties, I made brownies with sugar and eggs and pumped them full of espresso powder to fuel the all-nighters that got me through grad school. But that was when I lived in London. That was when I could stay up to write as long as I wanted. That was before I had to wake up the next morning and be responsible for another human being.

“No sugar?” she asks.

“No sugar.” This is because now that I’m in my thirties and all-nighters are no longer possible, I’ve gotten into Vitamixing. First, smoothies. Then, baby food. Now, DIY almond milk and sugar-free approximations of the traditional brownie. “I’ve actually given up sugar,” I say. “And dairy too. And caffeine. And alcohol.”

“All at once?”

“Yes,” I inform her, basking in the glow of my moral superiority. “It’s my New Year’s resolution.”

“You’re going to murder someone,” she tells me. She is doing Dry January and suggests, ever so gently, to avoid triggering any homicidal tendencies on my part, that I should try eliminating one vice at a time.

…thus begins my latest essay. You can read the rest of the piece over at Philadelphia Stories. They’re a fantastic local lit mag, run by some great people (I legit could NOT FIGURE OUT how to end this essay until one of their editors clued me in.) The cover, “Silent Witness,” is by local artist Catherine McIlhenny.

In other news, I taught my last class of the semester on Monday, submitted my last paper on Tuesday, and am a week and a half away from the official MFA Graduation Reading, for which I have treated to myself to a new pair of very expensive pants. Speaking of pants… tune in next week for a special post that’s going to be (almost) all about costumes 🙂