Cinnamon Raisin Quick Bread

He deployed. Monday, August 26, 2019. Luis Jr. — Private First Class Luis Gutierrez Jr. — deployed to the Middle East.

I did not go to the ceremony. There was no ceremony for mothers. There was a formation. There was a bus. There was a phone call at 5 AM that said: "I love you, Mom. I'll call when I can." And the line went dead. And the word "dead" is the word I cannot use about phone calls anymore because the word has too much weight and the weight crushes the sentence and the sentence is crushed and I am crushed and the floor — the bakery floor — catches me again, the way it always catches me, the way the floor has been my partner in grief since Rosa died, the floor that knows the shape of my knees and the weight of my body and the sound of a mother breaking.

I did not close the bakery. I cannot close the bakery. The bakery is the only place where my hands know what to do, and my hands need to do, and the doing is the only thread between sanity and the alternative, and the alternative is the room with the Javiers, and I cannot go to that room, not now, not with a son on a plane to a war zone, not with the what-if sentence pressing against the walls of my mind like water against a dam.

I made conchas. Two hundred. The same as always. The same recipe. The same hands. The same oven at 350. The same fifteen minutes. And when they came out — golden, perfect, Rosa's — I boxed a dozen and I labeled them and I put them on the counter and I didn't know who they were for until I realized they were for him. For Luis Jr. A dozen conchas for a boy who is on a plane and will not eat them and does not need them and they are for him anyway because the making of them is the prayer and the prayer is the only thing I can send across the ocean that doesn't require a military address.

Sofia closed the bakery at 2 PM. I didn't ask her to. She just did it. She turned off the ovens and locked the door and came to the house and found me in the kitchen — where else — and she sat next to me and she said: "He'll come back." And I said: "How do you know?" And she said: "Because Gutierrez women don't lose the people they love. We just lend them." She is fourteen. She just said the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me. We just lend them. The lending. The temporary surrender. The trust that what you lend will be returned. The faith of a fourteen-year-old girl in a world that has taken her grandmother and her grandfather and her cousin and is now borrowing her brother, and she believes in the return because she has to because the alternative is unbelievable.

The conchas were the prayer, but this loaf — this simple, sweet, cinnamon-warm loaf — is the one I make when I need my hands to keep moving and my mind to stop. Sofia brought the ingredients to the house that same evening, without being asked, the way she does everything: quietly and exactly right. If you are baking through something you cannot name, start here. The smell alone will hold you.

Prep Time: 15 min | Cook Time: 55 min | Total Time: 1 hr 10 min | Servings: 10 slices

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup raisins
1 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons sugar mixed with 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (for topping)

Instructions

Preheat oven. Heat your oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan and set aside.
Combine dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt until evenly blended. Stir in the raisins so they are well coated in the flour mixture.
Mix wet ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together the buttermilk, vegetable oil, eggs, and vanilla extract until smooth.
Fold together. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir gently just until combined — do not overmix. A few streaks of flour are fine. The batter will be thick.
Fill the pan. Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and smooth the top. Sprinkle the cinnamon-sugar topping evenly over the surface.
Bake. Bake for 50–55 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and the top is deep golden brown.
Cool before slicing. Let the loaf rest in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack. Allow to cool at least 20 minutes before slicing so it holds its shape.

Nutrition (per serving)

Cinnamon Raisin Quick Bread — The Loaf I Made When My Hands Needed Something to Do