Friendship Cake (Hope Springs) - Tapa dura

Here in the country, women grew up learning to cook before they were tall enough to reach the stove. It was the mother's and the grandmother's responsibility to make sure all the girls in the family could make a meal out of one strip of meat and a cup of beans. So we learned to cook. And we learned to be creative. We learned how to stretch dough across two weeks at three squares a day. We learned how to make soup from bones and old potatoes. And we learned to knead our sorrows and our dreams into loaves of bread and our worthiness into cherry pies and fatty pork chops."

--from Friendship Cake

Good humor, tender moments, and life lessons abound in this heartwarming portrait of small-town Southern life that is anything but simple and quiet. Five churchgoing women from Hope Springs, North Carolina, animate this humorous, poignant tale of coming to terms with one's weaknesses, honoring the fragility of life, loving passionately, laughing through tears, and thinking with the heart.

The cast of colorful characters includes: freshman pastor Charlotte Stewart, who experiences a crisis of faith; no-nonsense Margaret Peele, a widow and town confidante; sharp-tongued Louise Fisher, who has loved another woman, Roxie, for over forty years and finally gets to show it by caring for her in the last stages of Alzheimer's; Jessie Jenkins, the only African American in an all-white church; and busybody Beatrice Newgarden, who turns out to be the most solid friend to them all.

As these five very different women come together to create a church cookbook, they quickly become a source of solace, support, and strength for each other. Each struggling to make sense of her life--her past" her relationships, her faith--the women share much more than recipes; they share their passions, loves, heartbreaks, and hopes. Celebrating together and mourning together, they develop a deeper understanding of and compassion for each other and a genuine appreciation for the softness of heart and toughness of spirit that joins them as women. Just as surely as delectable Southern foods such as sweet potato casserole, prune cake, pecan pie, banana pudding, and corn relish sustain the body, it becomes evident that friendship nourishes the soul. The women end up with renewed faith, rekindled spirits, and the ingredients for true and lasting friendship.

Here are timeless truths--about the complexities of faith, the virtues of friendship, the resilience of the human spirit, and good living in the face of a changing world. A homespun tale sprinkled with grace and peppered with humor,Friendship Cake serves up comfort food for the soul.