[Curtis Mayfield - "Superfly"]
[rhythm and blues music]
- A lot of ingredients go into making a good memory,
but for Monica O Connell,
it usually includes butter and sugar.
- Lots of butter.
[crinkling of wrapper]
[rhythm and blues music]
[mixer whirring] [crack of egg]
- Baking a rum cake takes Monica back to
when she was a little girl living in the south.
- The memory is really literally one of me being
a young kid getting to stay up later than I usually do because
my parents were throwing one of their famous house parties.
Eating my mom's famous rum cake on the stairs
and watching the grown folks dance.
? But if you lose, don't ask no questions why
[rhythm and blues music]
The story makes the cake taste better.
? Ah-ha-ha
- Rum was a crucial ingredient in the cake and the party.
- There's a little bit of rum that goes into the batter,
but there's a lot of rum that just soaks into the cake itself.
- Part of the atmosphere was the music
at her parents' parties: 1970s R&B.
- The food ways and the musical traditions,
the fact that they do often,
they share the same space,
they influence one another.
- Food and music have influenced Monica all her life.
Let's get this bad boy in the oven.
Now of course when we eat this,
we're going to have to play the music.
? When I wake up in the mornin' love
- At first, Monica thought she would be a concert musician.
- While I was working on my masters
in French horn performance,
I started hanging out with musicologists.
- Musicologists don't perform music.
They study it as an academic field.
Monica went on to get a Ph.D.
in ethnomusicology and the study of black music.
- The ethnomusicology thing helped me think about
my own folks and my own music, my own culture
in some different ways.
- Eventually Monica became Executive Director
of the Center for Black Music Research
at Columbia College in Chicago.
- I also want to talk about what to me is
the inherent nature of diversity in the performing arts.
- So the baking fell off a little bit
until the job started getting stressful.
[laughs]
Then the baking found its way back in
because I needed an outlet.
In a minute, the whole kitchen
is just going to explode with butter-rum smell.
And it's going to be pretty awesome.
Baking was just this other space that I could be in.
It really does smell like home to me.
- While her love of baking remained a constant,
during the next few years,
Monica's life underwent some big changes.
She left her job, married a man from Wisconsin
and moved to Fort Atkinson.
- Fort doesn't have a bakery.
And here I am in this position. I'm free!
- So she decided to start her own business
as a baker and wanted to connect it
to the feeling she got from those childhood parties.
- What I want to recreate is just that feeling of ...
deliciousness and welcomeness.
- It made sense to Monica to name her business
after music and food so it became Curtis and Cake.
- But I like the name.
I like Curtis Mayfield.
- The most important word in the title might be the "and"
because it represents how the union of music and food can
create a good experience.
- So these ideas of culture and of hospitality and of the "and"
right?
So Curtis and Cake, bring the music in, bring the family in,
all of that.
[rhythm and blues horns]
- There's definitely been an adjustment period.
- Curtis and Cake required a commercial kitchen,
which led Monica to rent space in Madison.
- This is a dark chocolate stout
with salted caramel filling.
- Monica enjoys the relationships
formed with new customers.
- I like getting to be a part of these people's celebrations.
Even though I'm not there physically,
a little bit of me [laughs] I guess is there.
And that's pretty cool.
- Even though it's not the same as baking for fun.
- It gets a little stressful
'cause then you didn't mess up a cake.
Then you've messed up the beginning
of someone's life together.
- But in the end, Monica knows what she's selling.
- There she is. Yah.
I kinda want to be in the experience business,
to be honest.
- If her mother's rum cake
can bring Monica back to her childhood...
? I try to do the best
- It's a grown-up cake.
And that's probably part of why it felt so special
to have it when I was a kid.
- She hopes her cake can help create some new memories
for her customers.
? The key to our success to see each other through
? So in love
- Mm hmm.
[giggles]
- Yep.
That's just fine!
Now we really need some Curtis Mayfield playing.
[laughs]
? So in love, so in love
[fork clinks on plate]