Aunt’s tea cakes leave a sweet legacy

By Bob Leggett
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Elbert Mackey has been in the Air Force, doing Air Force things. He’s worked in nuclear security, too, making sure nobody breached a sensitive site with evil on their minds.

But that was in his other life. Now Mackey, 60, lives in Cedar Park and cooks tea cakes for a living. Lots of tea cakes, too. Big fat ones, small flat ones, crunchy and mushy. None of that cinnamon-covered stuff either; that’s a snickerdoodle . No sprinklings of sugar; those are sugar cookies.

Mackey is a tea-cake man, a guy whose obsession for his aunt Maggie Wimberly’s tea cakes, the ones he ate as a child growing up near Minden, La., led him to gather recipes wherever he traveled around the world and eventually to compile a book of tea cake recipes. [Read the full story here]