Martha Leonard Fontenot can still remember standing by her grandmother as a child in Vine Grove, Ken. while her grandmother whisked eggs to a stiff peak, by hand of course.
“She always did everything by hand,” Fontenot, now a retired teacher in Cedar Park, said. “She didn’t even like electric mixers.”
Fontenot is the author of “Grandma Liza’s Rainbow Cake,” a new children’s book. She will be at Hill Country Bookstore in Georgetown for a book signing Friday at noon.
For Easter every year, Sarah Eliza Martin Leornard, or Grandma Liza as Fontenot knew her, would make a rainbow-colored angel food cake. Though she was better known around town for her apple pie, the rainbow cake was what stuck with Fontenot.
Years later, when she was teaching a second-grade class in El Paso, she turned to her grandmother’s recipe to help integrate science, fractions and language arts. The students helped her write and illustrate a book about her grandmother’s cake.
She thought the rainbow cake would be good for her students because she was so drawn to it as a child. “It was one of my favorites. I was totally fascinated with how the colors looked when she cut a slice of it.”
When she retired and moved to Cedar Park in 2005, the original version of the book stayed with her, and the story never left her mind.
“It just kept tugging at me to do more because (my grandmother) was such an inspiration that I did not want her forgotten,” she said.
So, she pulled it out and started refining the story.
One of the biggest challenges, she said, was recreating her grandmother’s recipe. Like many life-long cooks, she had all her recipes memorized and added ingredients without measuring. Fontenot said she knew all the ingredients, but had to play with proportions. The final version of her experimentations is in the book.
When she finally had it just right, she approached publishers. She ended up self-publishing.
Now that she is marketing the book, she said she hopes it will stir good memories in those who read it.
“I really enjoyed writing the book,” she said. “I think that it has the universal ideas of family, love and community support.”