My mother’s family is Greek. For New Year’s, it is tradition among her people to bake vasilopita, a bread in which a coin or trinket is baked. Everyone takes a slice, and whoever gets the coin (in our family, we use a dime) has good luck for the year.
I can’t prove the dime actually brings good luck. Or that it doesn’t affect the taste of whatever it’s baked into. But still, though my grandmother and great-aunts are gone, my mother, my sister, and I continue to carry on the tradition. Sort of.
My online resources (and the one Greek guy at work) confirmed that vasilopita is actually bread, which was news to me. See, when we were growing up, Mom always made coffee cake (for which I applaud her. Bread is so boring—and it’s too easy to spot the dime in the slices, leading to cheating). The New Year’s Day coffee cake was cut into five pieces—one for Mom, Dad, my sister, me, and the house. (See? If the dime is in your slice, you win good luck. If the house gets it, in theory, you’re looking at a year with no major appliances breaking, which is also nice.)
As my sister and I grew up and moved away, we kept up the tradition. Kim has a family of four, so her homemade coffee cake too is cut into five pieces.
Then we have me.
First off, I’m not so great at remembering to make the coffee cake. I’ll confess I’ve used store-bought in the past, sticking the lucky dime in the bottom and giving it a spin. This year, though, I completely forgot (Jason had to remind me, and there’s not a single Greek in his family tree), and we had the added complication of me being unable to digest gluten. Plus the weather was bad, so the thought of driving to the gluten-free bakery one town over wasn’t appealing. “I’ll just make a cake,” I said. I have gluten-free flour. I have cinnamon. I could handle it, I figured.
Except, when I started futzing around in the kitchen, I discovered I didn’t feel like eating coffee cake. I felt like chocolate cake.
My ancestors would forgive me, right?
I made the gluten-free chocolate cake from scratch. I altered the recipe to add chocolate chips. And on New Year’s Day, we cut the cake into three giant hunks, and had cake for breakfast.
I’m not gonna lie: gluten-free chocolate cake, even with extra chocolate chips, is still pretty gross.
But I got the dime, as did my mother and sister in their respective households. So sure, we’ve morphed the tradition of vasilopita from bread to coffee cake to chocolate cake. But at least we’re still doing it, right?
Happy New Year!
I can’t prove the dime actually brings good luck. Or that it doesn’t affect the taste of whatever it’s baked into. But still, though my grandmother and great-aunts are gone, my mother, my sister, and I continue to carry on the tradition. Sort of.
My online resources (and the one Greek guy at work) confirmed that vasilopita is actually bread, which was news to me. See, when we were growing up, Mom always made coffee cake (for which I applaud her. Bread is so boring—and it’s too easy to spot the dime in the slices, leading to cheating). The New Year’s Day coffee cake was cut into five pieces—one for Mom, Dad, my sister, me, and the house. (See? If the dime is in your slice, you win good luck. If the house gets it, in theory, you’re looking at a year with no major appliances breaking, which is also nice.)
As my sister and I grew up and moved away, we kept up the tradition. Kim has a family of four, so her homemade coffee cake too is cut into five pieces.
Then we have me.
First off, I’m not so great at remembering to make the coffee cake. I’ll confess I’ve used store-bought in the past, sticking the lucky dime in the bottom and giving it a spin. This year, though, I completely forgot (Jason had to remind me, and there’s not a single Greek in his family tree), and we had the added complication of me being unable to digest gluten. Plus the weather was bad, so the thought of driving to the gluten-free bakery one town over wasn’t appealing. “I’ll just make a cake,” I said. I have gluten-free flour. I have cinnamon. I could handle it, I figured.
Except, when I started futzing around in the kitchen, I discovered I didn’t feel like eating coffee cake. I felt like chocolate cake.
My ancestors would forgive me, right?
I made the gluten-free chocolate cake from scratch. I altered the recipe to add chocolate chips. And on New Year’s Day, we cut the cake into three giant hunks, and had cake for breakfast.
I’m not gonna lie: gluten-free chocolate cake, even with extra chocolate chips, is still pretty gross.
But I got the dime, as did my mother and sister in their respective households. So sure, we’ve morphed the tradition of vasilopita from bread to coffee cake to chocolate cake. But at least we’re still doing it, right?
Happy New Year!
And yet, though disgusting, I ate two thirds of it.
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