January 29th
First a confession: I don’t like cake. I don’t like many sweet things, very occasionally I will need a sugar rush and I grab mini plain 70% chocolate bars but then I feel sick. So sweet is not neat, to me. Secondly I come from the womb of a real baker and confectioner. My mother could produce the most amazing cakes, I remember her Gateau St honore, it looked so pretty with the swans around a creme patisserie lake. It did not taste good but looked great (my taste buds.) My sweet toothed husband loved her banana & hazelnut meringue with butterscotch sauce and has always yearned for me to reproduce. So I have in my make up the ability to bake but when four out of five in a family are on restricted diets, baking is the last thing to do. I bake for other people and sometimes they work out like Kori’s honeymoon cake, but often they don’t. Why not? I know ratios, so 2-4-6 will produce shortbread and adding liquid of an egg or milk and water will make a passable cookie mix. 2-1 pastry, lard is better than butter but a mixture gives you a good colour and some elasticticity. Cake is 4-4-4 and then weigh the eggs to at least 4 to make a classic Victoria sponge, add in cream of tartar and bicarb for an all in one. It doesn’t matter if it curdles just keep going. Puff pastry equal amounts and use SW flour. But I hate recipes, I like concepts and then having a bash. I will not follow a recipe from beginning to end without changing one thing or doing it completely different. So I conceptualise in my head what the finished cake will look like and taste like and then I have to go backwards to work out how all those components will work together and then work out what needs to be done first. And then …
Well I sit with the information and my inner self tells me I can’t do it, perfectly, so why bother. I think this has been a metaphor for my life because I lived with perfection and nothing else would do. Perception Is everything. Just because we are going to make a hames of it or isn’t going to be as good as the next person we don’t try. There is nothing wrong with giving it a bash and seeing where it takes you. There comes a time when it takes more faith to fall apart with Jesus than to stay strong enough to stop it from happening. I have a tightly coiled friend who I think if I asked to come splash in puddles with me would break in half from the stress of doing something that 49 year old shouldn’t do. I don’t ask her to come splash but baking is my splashing. It stresses me out Unless I take all day at it and give myself permission to fail. We have a mighty Saviour who can change our entire lives inside and out if we just let go and let Him in. When I bake nowadays He is with me, letting me fail gently. For the past eighteen hours or so I have been ruminating of Talenkynic’s Delight. It would have to have the classic combo of chocolate, raspberries, cream and mint or ginger. But how? I am thinking of a roulade, plain fatness sponge, chocolate mousse, raspberries in ginger flavoured cream with a raspberry and ginger sauce. But I might make the sponge chocolate and the mousse white chocolate. Anyway I am planning to make this in commiserations or celebrations in a couple of weeks, but where will I take it?…
3 And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
Rebuilding Community 