*Chocolate Cake | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | 14.11.2025*
I remembered recently how my mother used to bake her chocolate cake every Friday, for years, and we all waited for it the entire week. By four in the afternoon the smell was already spreading through all the rooms, and that was the sign that Friday had arrived. That cake was the smell of Friday. It had been that way since I was in second grade, and throughout my entire adolescence, until one week, without any warning, maybe when I was already twenty five, my mother announced that this week she was making a different cake.
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We were all horrified and asked her, but why, why??? And she said she was simply tired of it. In the beginning it was fun baking that cake, then it became easy, she already made it without noticing, her hands prepared the recipe on their own, the way hands know how to drive automatically or play the piano. And then it bored her, but she kept going because she saw how much we loved it, but enough, she couldn’t anymore, she needed variety.
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Fifty two chocolate cakes a year, for so many years, doing the simple math there’s a chance she baked that cake more than eight hundred times...
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But in those moments we didn’t see the numbers in front of us. Only what had been taken from us.
What, you don’t like the chocolate cake? we asked her.
I do, she said.
So you don’t love us? We tried to stir a little guilt, lol.
I love you very much, she said.
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That didn’t change her decision. And from that week on she began making other cakes. Orange cakes, vanilla cakes, Chocolate babkas, all sorts of cakes, and she was happy and honestly we were happy too, and every so often she surprised us with that chocolate cake, the familiar one, but when she made it, it was because she herself missed it, not because she had to.
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But only this week I suddenly understood how long it took my mother to break the routine of the chocolate cake, and then I felt sorry remembering how hard we made it for her. It’s hard enough finding your own voice inside a system of family and tradition and expectations. And then holding on to that voice. And this question, how to create routine while still varying and changing, is a lifelong question.
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I, for example, keep a home routine, Friday dinners, all sorts of small family traditions, and I also move houses, and cities, and countries, every few years. And at work, even though I love everything I do, I still divide the year into seasons: a season in which I meet audiences around the country, a season in which I teach abroad, a season in which I make myself available for writing and publishing books, and a season devoted mainly to learning and renewing myself.
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And I’m telling you all this because not long ago I needed to make a decision: should I continue the large writing gatherings I’ve been holding on Zoom since the war with Iran escalated, or change them? Hundreds of people signed up every month and loved that routine exactly the way I loved my mother’s chocolate cake. But the emergency days passed, and suddenly it seemed much more natural for this project to reflect my own way of doing things: meaning, that we divide the year into seasons of inspiration. That each season we focus on something different. That within all that we keep a routine, and still... also have variety.
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Except that everyone I consulted with told me this was business suicide. You’re supposed to work today with automatic monthly payments, subscriptions. They showed me how everything around us works like that: all the apps and the storage of our photo albums, and even newspapers and of course television, everything forces us into recurring payments.
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And facing all those voices I reminded myself that these concepts are not connected to me. This is not a business decision, this is a decision of the heart. Because this is about the beating heart of hundreds of people, about a community, about creation, shared learning, words written and words read, and it has to be delicious, surprising, varied, like any inspiration.
And like my mother insisted on teaching us and herself - it has to come with listening to our inner voice, right?
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It’s a small story, the story of the cake. But because of it I created the Seasons of Inspiration. The upcoming season, for example, will focus on American poetry and poetry from elsewhere in the world, mainly women’s voices but not only, simply because I’ve been translating to Hebrew a lot of that poetry for a while and I’ve collected things that are just beautiful. I have to share them. But there will be other seasons in which we learn and write with completely different inspiration, according to what the heart says, feminism and Hinduism and whatnot.
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By the way, I want to tell you two more things. The first is that after my mother died we began making her chocolate cake ourselves and what did we discover? That it was the recipe printed on the Osem flour package sometime in the seventies! A recipe for a simple good cake without staged photos or marketing or recurring payments.
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A recipe printed on packages was the smell of our wonderful Fridays. Who would have believed!
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And the second thing is that once a year, when we visit her grave in the winter overlooking the Sea of Galilee, we bring with us her chocolate cake already cut into squares and hand it out to everyone who comes, and then we stand there around the grave and eat. And I am certain in those moments that my mother is winking from the sky and very pleased. Pleased that we finally learned to make it ourselves, and pleased with the routine we keep, but with... variety.
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So here is the recipe for our chocolate cake, plus some adaptations we’ve made because some of us are now gluten free and sugar free and dairy free.
And you’re invited to join the upcoming inspiration season with me for Hebrew speakers, although you can always write in English. We’ll start in December, and all the details are waiting for you in the link at the bottom of the column.
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*Ofra Tevet’s Chocolate Cake*
Dry ingredients bowl:
One and a half cups flour (can be GF)
Half a cup cocoa powder
One tablespoon baking powder
Wet ingredients bowl:
Two eggs
One cup milk (any kind)
One cup sugar (or: one cup coconut sugar+half a cup silan)
150 g butter (or 3/4 cup olive/coconut oil)
Whisk everything separately, then combine into one bowl, no fuss, and bake at 350 degrees.
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Wishing us all a Shabbat Shalom, and may we always dare to listen to ourselves,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*