When she was little, growing up in a one-room cabin in the woods in rural Vermont, her mother sometimes made cake. It was called lightning cake, and it was from a very old cookbook, passed down from her grandmother to her mother, and, eventually, to her.

It wasn't as sweet as modern cakes. She remembers being a child of ... eight, perhaps, or some age that was quite like being eight, as seen through the hazy veil of memory. She remembers being a child, and sitting at the old octagonal kitchen table in the sun, and eating a piece of that cake with her hands.

When she was a child, everything was delicious. But even then, there was a cloying sweetness to most cakes — a fundamental lack of substance — that left them feeling not quite right.

She never had that problem with lightning cake.

It was one of her mother's favorites, as well. She can't really picture her grandmother making it for her, though. She loved her grandmother. She was an incredibly formidable woman.

But she can't really picture her sitting in the kitchen with her mother, handing her a slice of cake from the oven. The image simply doesn't fit into the concept of the woman she knew, before her grandmother passed away.

She can imagine her grandmother doing her taxes, say, or playing bridge. She can imagine her grandmother hosting a dinner party, and maybe even serving cake then, in those formal and regimented circumstances.

Perhaps her mother learned to like the cake then, at those kinds of events.

It doesn't really matter, Willow supposes. What matters now is that one of her woke up yesterday with a craving for lightning cake, searched the directory of food items for it, and had a slice.

And it wasn't right.

There are millions of foods available in the catalogues by now. So many people contributing their home and family recipes, or contributing their own unique creations, for money or just for the joy of sharing something they love with the world.

There are 8,140 variations on 'lightning cake' available to her, and none of them are the one that her mother made for her when she was small.

The first step is probably to check the recipe. She doesn't live in her childhood home anymore — there are too many of her for that — but she took some high-quality scans of all the books, so she has a copy of the cookbook saved.

Willow shakes herself from her reverie, and pads across her house. The morning sun slants in over the snow-capped mountains, brightly illuminating the smooth hardwood floor. Outside, a river runs down from the peaks, cold with snow melt, and splits around either side of her house. Fish leap in it, sending shimmering reflections scattering across her living-room ceiling.

She opens the door to the library, and finds the volume on the shelf.

Her library is not dusty. The whole house is cleaned more or less automatically, because she cannot stand doing chores, and so her system saw them automated long ago. But she does enjoy the look of dust motes dancing in the sunbeams, and so there is actually a little dust added back — just enough to flavor things, and send the sparkles dancing as she pulls the book from the shelf.

She takes it over to a reading desk, and carefully flips to the index. Lightning cake is easy to find:

Ingredients:

• 4 eggs
• 2 cups sugar
• 4 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 cup milk
• 12 tbsp butter, melted
• 1 tsp lemon extract
• 2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350℉
Beat eggs and add sugar while beating
Add flour, sifted with baking powder and salt
Add milk, melted butter, lemon extract and vanilla
Bake 25 minutes in oiled layer cake pans at 350℉
Put together with any desired filling and frost as desired

But she can immediately tell that this won't be sufficient, because her mother treated recipes as guidelines at the best of times. For one thing, the lightning cake of her childhood was neither layered nor filled — almost certainly because her mother could not be bothered. They are alike in many ways, and when Willow still had to work for a living, she very much shared her mother's aversion to putting any effort towards culinary frippery.

But now, she has the time to get it right.

She copies the recipe onto her HUD, and carefully re-shelves the book. She'll have to conduct some experiments — but that's perfectly fine.

Her house does not actually have a kitchen, because she conjures 90% of her food and eats out the other 10% of the time. But it does have a large empty room that she can quickly repurpose to her project du jour. She summons in a generic oven — her childhood oven having gone to the great recycling facility in the sky many years ago — and a nice counter surface, complete with mixing and measuring bowls of various kinds and sizes.

She could just turn the recipe into an industrial process specification, and let the fixity crystals handle assembling it. But a bit of experimentation with trying to produce some of her mother's other dishes has shown that doing it by hand is the best way to notice when there is some obscure variation in the process that only becomes noticeable when you follow all the steps.

So she summons in ingredients.

Eggs from the farm down the road from her childhood home. Milk from the dairy just beyond it, and butter as well. Flour from the shop her mother frequented at the time — although she does not actually know what kind. For a cake, she'd assume white flour, but her mother was sometimes self-consciously healthy, and had a tendency to use whole flour in things.

She gets both. She'll run through the white flour first, and then try again with whole.

The sugar, baking powder, salt, and lemon extract are more generic. There weren't any local sources of those as a child, so whatever she can get is probably fine. She might need to experiment a little with the sugar, but there's a limited number of ways to mess up salt.

Although it isn't actually pure NaCl. She learned her lesson after the industrial baking incident: chemistry is subtly different than baking, and trying to use pure ingredients does not actually improve the end product.

So she gets normal table salt — which is mostly NaCl, but there's some I in there too, as well as various trace amounts of Si, K, and half a dozen other elements.

The vanilla extract comes directly from the ever-full bottle on her mother's mantelpiece. It's the same bottle as her childhood, although the vanilla beans or the whiskey have been replaced from time to time, as it got used up. It's the same vanilla extract in the way that she is the same person as that child at the octagonal table.

She mentally plots out her experiments. She wants to try both kinds of flour, maybe some different sugars. She wants to try more sugar, as well, since the recipe is calibrated for 1900s sensibilities, and while lightning cake lacks the sugar of terrible modern cakes, she's not sure whether her mother would have doubled it.

Oh ­— and she can't forget the icing, of course. She'll want to try different icings to find the right one. She thinks her mother usually made butter cream icing, but she wouldn't swear to that.

For her first experiment, she will make the cake exactly as the recipe describes it, and see where to go from there.

Luckily, her mother had an electric beater, so she won't have to rig up a model arm or anything like that. She beats the sugar into the eggs, and sets the dry ingredients sifting into another bowl while she does.

The dry ingredients get mixed in too, the way her mother showed her, many years ago: carefully added a bit at a time, to keep the batter evenly mixed, until that proves to be too slow and you dump the last half of the dry ingredients in all at once.

Her mother was not a delicate baker.

The wet ingredients follow, and they are not pre-mixed.

For the baking pans, she doesn't bother with a non-stick coating; she can just delete the pans once the cake is done.

She pre-heats the oven with a snap of her fingers, and places the baking pan inside. Then, she accelerates the oven forward through time for 25 minutes and pulls the pan back out. Well, it isn't really time manipulation. Actually, she just asks her fixity crystal to stick the whole oven in simulation and run it faster than real time for a moment 

She doesn't need oven mitts — her forb handles the temperature just fine.

She sets the cake on a plate, deletes the pan out from under it, and then accelerates it another handful of minutes to let it cool.

The cake is ... not great.

The outside is weird, in a way she doesn't like. The cake of her childhood was a beautiful golden brown, and this one isn't.

... and that's why she should have greased the pan. She shakes her head. The butter for greasing the pan was important to the outside baking correctly.

She rewinds the kitchen until she was about to pour the batter, and then adds a lining of butter to the inside of the pan. She should also try it with oil, since her mother was probably more likely to use that.

She forwards through the baking again, and tries another piece.

It's better. The texture is right, at least, and that counts for a lot. The cake is warm and solid, just like she remembers. Unfortunately, it also tastes too much like flour, and not so much like lemon.

Her mother might have added more lemon extract to it, but more likely her guess about the sugar was right.

Changing the amount of sugar requires going right back to the beginning of the recipe, though. She sets aside her first try, pausing it in time so she'll have a stable point of comparison, and begins from the top.

Her mother might have doubled the sugar, but that seems like too much. More likely, she went from two cups to three. She tries that first, running through the whole process again.

The cake is better this time — but maybe a little too sweet. And also a little too crumbly, actually. It isn't holding together as well. The surface is kind of sticky, also.

Maybe her mother only went up to two and a half cups of sugar. Or maybe her childhood oven ran a little hotter, or maybe half a dozen other things are not quite right.

There's only one way to find out.

She prepares twelve variations — more and less sugar, whole and white flour, and lower, equal, and higher temperatures. With so many variations to try, she mirrors the counter and her mixing bowls twelve times, and prepares them all at once, casting an eye over all twelve bowls to ensure they're mixing similarly.

A few moments later, she has twelve cakes to test.

... that is really too many cakes to discern the subtle differences between herself. The risk of tasting one cake and anchoring on it is too great.

Luckily, she isn't in this alone.

She registers a new scientific study, a double-blind comparison, and sets it to roll out across 1% of her self-tree. She prepares a nice template plate, with two slices to compare. And across the solar system, 144 different variations of the plate materialize near copies of herself who aren't currently too busy.

The question that accompanies it is: "Which of these two cakes do you think is more like lightning cake from our childhood?"

She takes a break to read another chapter of her current book and sample her own creations while she waits for the results. Even with instantaneous communication across the solar system, it still takes time to gather the data.

Once the data rolls in, there is a clear winner: the variants with less sugar, white flour, and equal or higher temperatures win. Between the two, an ANOVA indicates that the difference is not statistically significant, but the higher temperature variant is slightly in the lead.

Willow taps her chin in thought, and then writes up a fragment for her self-tree's internal wiki:

Our childhood oven probably ran slightly hot. See this data vs. the recipe our mother probably worked from.

With that data in hand, she prepares another six variants based on the winning variety, slightly tweaked in each way she's tested before. Another quick poll across a different 1% of her self-tree shows no statistically significant difference between the top three versions, but that does narrow things down slightly.

Willow decides that that's probably a close enough recreation, and turns her focus to the icing.

Luckily, she knows that her mother's icing is very simple: confectioner's sugar, melted butter, and lemon juice. She quickly whips some up, and then picks out three identical slices of the final version of the cake.

She places them on little plates, and then artfully drizzles small, medium, and large amounts of the icing over them. If she were being fancy, she might garnish the cakes with berries as well.

But she isn't being fancy, she's being nostalgic.

She registers the three slices with her self-tree's pattern-management system as variants of their childhood lightning cake, and marks the task complete.

And across the solar system, when one of her gets the particular craving ...

... she has herself a slice of cake, fresh from the oven and from her childhood.